Vitalik Buterin Targets DeFi Projects on Ethereum, Says He Does Not Respect Unsustainable Protocols

Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin thinks decentralized finance (DeFi) projects need to demonstrate that they’re “useful in a sustainable way” without sacrificing core principles like permissionlessness and decentralization.

Buterin says on the social media platform X that he’s a fan of decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and uses them every week, and he says the decentralized betting platform Polymarket “is great.”

He also likes decentralized stablecoins, specifically mentioning RAI, a crypto asset backed by ETH.

Additionally, Buterin praises the stablecoin USDC, which aims to maintain a 1:1 peg to the US dollar.

“I think USDC is less great than RAI, but as a practical matter, we simply have to respect that it’s incredibly convenient and lots of people use it.

It’s incredibly useful for me personally when doing international donations, way more convenient than banking.

We are here to try to make the global economy and society more open and free, and people in emerging markets using stablecoins to freely transact is a real live use case that’s happening everywhere. USDC on Ethereum is also far better than account-to-account transfers inside centralized exchanges, which also happens a lot.

If we get lots of people using USDC, that creates a situation where it becomes easier for people to move to other more decentralized stablecoins too.”

Conversely, Buterin likens liquidity farming to an ouroboros, a symbol of a snake or dragon eating its own tail.

“Things that I *don’t* respect, are basically things whose attractiveness comes from some temporary source that has no sustainability, eg. I felt no excitement toward the 2021-era liquidity farming craze because it was obvious that it came from token issuances that are fundamentally temporary.

If people tell me ‘You can get good yield by parking your coins here,’ my question always is, ‘Where does the yield come from?’ Who are the people on the other side of the transaction, who are paying the yield? In those cases where there is a specific answer to the question, that there is a good reason to believe will remain true in five years, then I am absolutely excited about it.”

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