Ethereum News: Vitalik Buterin Says USDC and USDT Undermine Crypto Ideals

Key Insights

• Ethereum news shows Vitalik Buterin called centralized crypto projects “corposlop” on Feb. 16.
• RAI was praised as furthest from corposlop but shut down in 2023 due to staking competition.
• Two unsolved problems block decentralized stablecoin including staking competition and oracle reliability.

Things took an interesting turn on Feb. 16 as a different kind of Ethereum news flashed. Vitalik Buterin published one of his most direct posts ever. He called most centralized crypto projects “corposlop.” That is his word for corporate slop.

Projects that use blockchain technology but operate under centralized control and traditional finance mechanics. Ethereum stays neutral as a protocol. But Buterin made clear he does not.

Buterin Defines Corposlop in a Key Ethereum News Bit

The post covered significant ground. Buterin listed everything you do not need to agree with him on to use Ethereum. Politics. DeFi philosophy. AI views. Even personal opinions, like believing Berlin has the best food in Europe. None of it matters for accessing the network.

But he drew a firm line between protocol neutrality and personal neutrality. Ethereum cannot discriminate between users or applications. Anyone can deploy anything without asking permission from Buterin or the Ethereum Foundation. That is the entire point of permissionlessness.

Personal neutrality is different. Buterin argued that pretending to have no opinions is not pragmatism. He called it hollow. The modern world requires people to clearly state their principles. Criticizing a project as corposlop is not censorship. The protocol still runs it. The criticism is simply a personal opinion.

He used Linux as an example.

Linux powers both freedom tools and massive corporate infrastructure simultaneously. If you care about Linux for freedom reasons, you cannot just build the kernel.

You must build a full ecosystem that reflects those values. Ethereum works the same way. He ended the post with one word. Milady: A nod to the countercultural Milady Maker NFT community that represents the anti-corporate side of Ethereum.

RAI Was the Answer, but Failed

Someone asked Buterin which stablecoins he would not consider corposlop. His answer was immediate. RAI from Reflexer Labs was as far from corposlop as possible.

RAI was an ETH-backed stablecoin with no centralized issuer. No company could freeze user funds. No bank relationships existed to maintain a fiat peg. Liquidations happened entirely through smart contracts. It represented everything Buterin values in a stablecoin.

RAI shut down in 2023. The reason was economic, not technical. Locking ETH as collateral meant giving up staking yields. Ethereum staking offered returns of 3% to 5% annually at the time. Holding RAI collateral offered nothing. Rational users chose staking over RAI, and the project wound down.

Note: As of February 2026, the Reflexer protocol and RAI remain technically operational on Ethereum, with active minting/redemption available via the official dashboard. However, the system has extremely low adoption, liquidity, and trading volume, leading some community members to describe it as effectively dormant or “shut down” in practice.

Two Problems Nobody Has Solved

Buterin identified two problems blocking any RAI successor from emerging. The first is staking competition. ETH locked as stablecoin collateral cannot be staked. More collateral means less staking, which weakens network security over time.

The second problem is oracle reliability. Even decentralized price feeds can be manipulated during extreme market conditions. Any new decentralized stablecoin needs a price data infrastructure that resists attacks without using centralized providers.

Major stablecoins like USDT and USDC sit firmly in corposlop territory by these standards. Both issuers can freeze any wallet at any time. One company’s decision revokes access without warning. Buterin noted that issuer-backed stablecoins could improve by requiring multiple independent parties to agree before freezing funds. Ethereum news shows that Buterin clearly identified the problem on Feb. 16. The solution still does not exist.

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