Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin has renewed his push for decentralized social media arguing that competition — rather than engagement-maximising algorithms or speculative tokens — is essential to building healthier mass communication systems.
In a post on X, Buterin said he plans to be “fully back to decentralized social” in 2026, framing the shift as a response to deep structural problems in today’s dominant platforms.
“If we want a better society, we need better mass communication tools,” he wrote, calling for systems that surface high-quality information, help people find points of agreement, and serve users’ long-term interests instead of optimising for short-term engagement.
According to Buterin decentralization provides a starting point by allowing real competition. Shared data layers allow multiple clients to be built on top of the same social graph, reducing the power of any single interface or algorithm.
“Decentralization is the way to enable that,” he said, arguing that choice at the client level is critical to improving online discourse. Buterin notes that his return to decentralized social is already underway.
Since the start of the year, he said every post he has written or read has been accessed through Firefly, a multi-client interface that supports X, Lens, Farcaster and Bluesky.
The experience, he suggested, highlights how decentralized tools can coexist with — and gradually pull attention away from — centralized platforms.
Tokens Are Not Social Innovation
Buterin was sharply critical of how many crypto-native social projects have evolved. Too often, he argued, teams mistake the addition of a speculative token for meaningful innovation.
While combining money and social interaction is not inherently flawed — he cited Substack as an example of a system that successfully supports high-quality content — problems arise when platforms create price bubbles around creators instead of rewarding the content itself.
Over the past decade, Buterin said, repeated attempts to financialise social influence have failed in predictable ways: rewarding pre-existing social capital rather than quality and ultimately collapsing as tokens trend toward zero.
He dismissed claims that creating new markets and assets is automatically beneficial, describing such thinking as “galaxy-brained” rhetoric that masks a lack of genuine interest in improving information flow. “That is not Hayekian info-utopia,” he wrote. “That is corposlop.”
A Renewed Focus on the ‘Social’
For decentralized social to succeed, Buterin argued, it must be led by teams that care deeply about the social problem itself.
He praises the Aave team’s stewardship of Lens to date and said he is optimistic about the project’s next phase, pointing to the incoming team’s long-standing interest in encrypted social communication.
Buterin said he plans to post more actively on Lens this year and encouraged users to spend more time across Lens, Farcaster and the broader decentralized social ecosystem.
The goal is to move beyond “a single global info warzone” and reopen a frontier where new and healthier forms of online interaction can emerge.
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