Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said he intends to move away from centralized social media platforms by 2026, revealing that he already relies on Firefly a multi-client tool that lets users post across X, Lens, Farcaster, and Bluesky.
In a recent post on X, Buterin said strong communication systems are essential for a healthy society, but argued that today’s dominant platforms are designed to maximize short-term engagement rather than serve users’ long-term interests. He added that these systems often fail to elevate high-quality information, meaningful debate, or shared understanding.
While acknowledging that there is no single solution, Buterin said increased competition is a crucial starting point something decentralization can help unlock. He explained that decentralized social networks can share a common data layer, allowing anyone to build a client without trapping users inside a single platform.
Shift Toward Decentralized Social
Buterin said he returned to decentralized social platforms earlier this year and noted that all of his reading and posting in 2026 has been done through Firefly, which aggregates multiple social networks into one interface.
He also criticized the direction taken by many crypto-powered social media projects, arguing that the industry has often treated speculative tokens as innovation. Although he said combining money and social platforms is not inherently problematic pointing to Substack as a working example he said most crypto social experiments have focused on inflating creator tokens rather than improving content quality.
According to Buterin, these efforts have repeatedly failed over the past decade by rewarding existing influence instead of valuable contributions, with many associated tokens losing most of their value within one or two years. He also dismissed claims that creating new markets is automatically beneficial because it “elicits information,” saying such arguments are often contradicted by product designs that do little to help users act on that information.
Buterin stressed that decentralized social platforms should be developed by teams focused on solving real social issues and improving online interaction not on financial speculation.
256 ETH Donated to Privacy Tools
In November, Buterin donated 256 ETH to support privacy-focused messaging projects, splitting the funds equally between Session and SimpleX, both of which are building end to end encrypted communication tools.
He said private messaging is critical to digital privacy and highlighted permissionless account creation and metadata protection as areas that still require significant improvement. While acknowledging the platforms are still evolving, Buterin encouraged more developers to help tackle the remaining technical challenges.
