Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin warns the crypto community about “official” scams
2 min readEthereum founder Vitalik Buterin highlighted the importance of cultural awareness and the rise of scams in the cryptocurrency industry on May 30. He warned users against the misleading use of common terms, pointing out that some of them can have a very different meaning in cryptocurrency than in other fields.
In a recent post on Farcaster, Buterin argued that understanding the nuances of language is important in the crypto industry.
Vitalik Buterin argues against nuances in the crypto industry
Buterin gave a parallel example to illustrate his point: In most European languages, “actual” means “current” and “concurrency” means “competition.” In crypto, “DAO” often means “project,” and “official” can sometimes mean “scam.” The linguistic nuance shows how words can have different meanings depending on context and cultural background.
These findings from Vitalik Buterin come in the wake of recent scams involving celebrity official accounts.
On May 26, scammers targeted the official X-account of popular crypto influencer Gigantic-Cassocked-Rebirth (GCR) to promote the memecoins ORDI and Luna 2.0, resulting in a temporary price increase of 6% and 274%, respectively.
The official X accounts of rapper Rich the Kid and media personality Caitlyn Jenner were also compromised, raising further security concerns.
In the case of Rich the Kid, a new token called $RICH was created on the Solana memecoin launchpad pump.fun and promoted on X. Within the first two minutes of launch, $RICH reached a market cap of $90,000 before falling back down.
Caitlyn Jenner’s account was used to promote a memecoin called $JENNER, increasing the coin’s market cap to $22 million, based on aggregated data from Raydium and Gecko Terminal.
Jenner no deep fakes. All real crypto. 113.5M USD volume in just over 4 hours.
These launches quickly became controversial as the teams behind them were accused of committing fraud, exploiting their subscribers for liquidity, and engaging in inappropriate behavior.
Vitalik Buterin’s insights coincide with the US SEC’s warning
Vitalik Buterin’s recent findings are consistent with a warning issued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on May 29.
The SEC highlighted the dangers associated with making cryptocurrency investment decisions based solely on information from online sources and social media platforms.
The notice reminded investors to be cautious and conduct thorough research before making investment decisions in the cryptocurrency space.
The SEC is not the only regulator warning about fraudulent crypto investments. On May 28, Canada warned about increasing pig butchering and crypto investment scams targeting Canadian citizens.
