Vitalik Buterin
The co-creator of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, is somewhat known for his strong opinions on matters related and unrelated to cryptocurrencies.
Recently, he’s been featured in a TIME Magazine interview that had the entire crypto world buzzing.
People who’ve been following the crypto space for more than a few months must surely be aware that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are currently where all the rage is. More specifically, there is one project that’s unable to come off major headlines – the Bored Ape Yacht Club.
Buterin, however, doesn’t really appreciate what’s been going on, especially concerning the prices of said Bored Ape NFTs.
The peril is you have these $3 million monkeys and it becomes a different kind of gambling. – He said while TIME Magazine noted he was talking about BAYC.
To this date, the Bored Ape Yacht Club remains the most popular collection by all means – volume, overall market capitalization, floor price, and popularity.
The hype surrounding BAYC skyrocketed last week when Yuga Labs – the company behind the collection – launched the long-awaited APE coin. This is the cryptocurrency that underpins the entire BAYC ecosystem, and it made headlines because it was airdropped to holders of BAYC-related NFTs who received hundreds of thousands of dollars for just holding their Bored Apes.
No, this is not a pun related to BAYC’s ‘Otherside’ metaverse teaser. Buterin also talked about the situation between Russia and Ukraine, as he has done numerous times in the past month. In fact, he’s become one of the most vocal supporters of Ukraine, proclaiming that he will not maintain neutrality in such a conflict.
Speaking to TIME, he said:
One silver lining of the situation in the last three weeks is that it has reminded a lot of people in the crypto space that ultimately the goal of crypto is not to play games with million-dollar pictures of monkeyts, it’s to do things that accomplish meaningful effects in the real world.
When pondering upon things he’d like to change about himself going forward in the year, he said that he hopes to be “more risk-taking and less neutral.”
I would rather Ethereum offend some people than turn into something that stands for nothing.