Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has criticized cryptocurrencies issued by politicians as “a perfect bribery vehicle.”
“If a politician issues a coin, you do not even need to send them any coins to give them money,” Buterin explained in a tweet. “Instead, you just buy and hold the coin, and this increases the value of their holdings passively.”
He added that one of the reasons these “politician coins” are potentially excellent tools for bribery is the element of “deniability.”
The Ethereum founder explained that holding a cryptocurrency has the twin financial effects of “donating to the issuer,” by indirectly increasing the value of their holdings, and “gambling,” as you have a chance of your stake going up. Therefore, Buterin said that people can donate to coin issuers while falsely claiming, when asked, that they are merely speculating or “gambling” on the cryptocurrency.
Buterin was clear in his position: “I recommend politicians do not go down this path.”
In a follow-up tweet, he argued that politician coins are not “just sources of fun, whose harm is at most contained to mistakes made by voluntary participants,” but “vehicles for unlimited political bribery, including from foreign nation-states.”
Buterin continued that “now is the time to talk about the difference between sugar-high short-term fun that is unwise to recommend to newbies and long-term fulfillment and wealth-building.” He compared some cryptocurrency projects to “modern hyper-addictive cellphone games” and others to traditional games like “chess.”
His comments come after U.S. President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump launched Solana-based meme coins TRUMP and MELANIA. The coins attracted billions in investment within hours of launch—and drew widespread criticism from both inside and outside the crypto world.
Frequent crypto critic Senator Elizabeth Warren joined Representative Jake Auchincloss in calling for an investigation into the Trump and Melania meme coins, raising concerns over national security and conflicts of interest.
In a post on social media network Bluesky, billionaire investor Mark Cuban said of Trump’s crypto venture that, “This is not crypto any more than Madoff was just buying and selling shares of stock.”
Caitlin Long, CEO of the digital-asset-focused Custodia Bank, said in a tweet that “one of the side effects of meme-coining is that Trump now has a real incentive to change the taxation of #crypto in the U.S.”
TRUMP is currently worth $33.87, down 9.7% on the day, per CoinGecko data. Trump’s personal stake in the memecoin is unknown at the time of writing, based on publicly available information.
Main image by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch licensed under CC BY 2.0.
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