Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin Says He’s Leaving Centralized Social Media Behind in 2026

Vitalik Buterin said that he already posts through Firefly, a multi-client covering X, Lens, Farcaster, and Bluesky.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said he plans to return fully to decentralized social media in 2026. In the latest post on X, he explained that better mass communication tools are necessary for a better society while pointing out that the current platforms often prioritize short-term engagement over users’ long-term interests and fail to surface the best information, arguments, or areas of agreement.

He said there is no simple solution to these issues, but added that increased competition is an important starting point, which can be enabled through decentralization. According to Buterin, decentralized social media can support competition by relying on a shared data layer that allows anyone to build their own client on top, rather than locking users into a single platform.

Decentralized Social Media

He also said he had already returned to decentralized social at the start of this year. Interestingly, every post he has made or read in 2026 has been done through Firefly, a multi-client platform that supports reading and posting across X, Lens, Farcaster, and Bluesky.

Buterin criticized the direction many crypto-based social media projects have taken in the past, while stating that the industry has often treated the addition of speculative tokens as innovation. He said that while mixing money and social platforms is not inherently wrong, and cited Substack as an example of an economy that supports high-quality content through subscriptions, past crypto social experiments have focused on creating price bubbles around creators rather than supporting content quality.

He said these approaches have repeatedly failed over the past decade by rewarding existing social capital instead of good content and by seeing associated tokens collapse in value after one or two years. Buterin further slammed arguments that creating new markets and assets is automatically beneficial because it “elicits information,” and said that such claims are often contradicted by product decisions that do not prioritize users’ ability to benefit from that information.

He said decentralized social platforms should instead be built and run by teams that are primarily focused on solving social problems and improving online interaction.

256 ETH Donation

In November, Buterin donated a total of 256 ETH to support the development of privacy-focused messaging tools. 128 ETH each were poured into Session and SimpleX, two projects working on end-to-end encrypted communication. Buterin said encrypted messaging is critical for digital privacy and promoted permissionless account creation and metadata privacy as crucial areas still needing improvement.

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While acknowledging that the platforms remain works in progress, he actively pushed privacy-focused communication forward. He also urged more developers to help address remaining technical challenges.