On January 21, 2026, Eastern Standard Time, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced plans to fully return to decentralized social networks in 2026, pulling himself back into a battlefield he had once distanced himself from. In his statement, he emphasized that to "build a better society," it is essential to have mass communication and social tools that genuinely serve long-term value. He also pointed out the current reality of the crypto social space, which overly relies on speculative tokens and creates price bubbles around creators. The ideal of open, censorship-resistant, and composable social protocols has once again become a focal point of discussion, torn between the rampant issuance of tokens and short-term speculation seen on-chain. Vitalik explicitly criticized some projects for viewing "token issuance" and the hype around creator assets as innovation while neglecting infrastructure development and long-term user value. He also publicly expressed recognition for ecosystems like Lens and Farcaster, encouraging users to participate in these decentralized social experiments that aim to return to the protocols and products themselves.

From Silence to Return: The Social Battlefield Choice of Ethereum's Founder

In recent years, Vitalik has focused more on technical topics such as scalability, privacy, and Layer 2 in public discussions, showing relative restraint in directly addressing crypto social issues, which appeared sporadically in blog footnotes or interview snippets rather than as a main narrative. By early 2026, he re-emerged with the stance of "planning a full return to decentralized social networks," pushing this topic back to the center stage, distinctly different from his previous technical roadmap expressions. Vitalik elevated decentralized social to the level of social infrastructure, stating that to "build a better society," it is necessary to create mass communication and social tools that genuinely serve long-term value. These tools are not just a new category of applications on-chain but are key carriers for redistributing discourse power, reducing censorship risks, and protecting individual expression spaces. His return reflects not merely curiosity about new products but a proactive stance on values: at the intersection of on-chain finance and on-chain social, he prefers to bet on paths that prioritize protocol openness, user sovereignty, and developer ecosystems over short-term token gains. This shift from a technical architect to a public goods advocate makes his return more of a declaration of position rather than a simple product evaluation.

Clash of Ideals and Bubbles: The Short-term Frenzy of Speculative Tokens

When Vitalik began to discuss social issues again, he first offered a series of criticisms rather than a roadmap. He specifically pointed out that some crypto social projects "overly rely on speculative tokens," habitually treating "token issuance" and the creation of price bubbles around creators as shortcuts to innovation and growth, as if simply packaging content, identity, or social graphs into financial assets would naturally attract liquidity and attention. In contrast, the familiar practices in the space include projects hastily issuing tokens in the early stages, using complex incentive mechanisms, short-term ranking boosts, and emotional marketing to inflate prices, then telling "social innovation" stories at peak phases, while rarely truly investing resources in refining protocols, content tools, and developer support. Short-term price games have squeezed the space for long-term product iteration, forcing teams to scramble between "stacking new narratives" and "maintaining token prices," marginalizing the engineering work that truly concerns user experience and safety, making it increasingly difficult for outsiders to discern which projects are genuinely protocol-centric and which are merely another round of speculative hype. When "decentralized social" is more understood as "the new round of social market trends" rather than public infrastructure, public trust in this narrative will be continuously diluted. Vitalik's criticism targets this structural distortion that turns creators and users into price chips rather than co-builders of the ecosystem.

Firefly Aggregation Experiment: Attitude Expression on Multi-Platform Entry

In the specific actions of this return, one detail stands out: research briefs indicate that Vitalik has begun using Firefly.social as his aggregation client, a piece of information currently from a single source that needs further verification. What is certain is that Firefly is not a replacement for a single platform but an aggregation entry that presents different social networks like X, Lens, Farcaster, Bluesky in a unified manner, allowing users to browse and participate in various social environments from one interface. Vitalik's choice is not about "taking sides" with a particular platform but prioritizing tools that can bridge multiple protocols and platforms, revealing his emphasis on openness and interoperability. Rather than building new "platform islands" within a single ecosystem, he prefers to treat different networks as multiple endpoints of the same information space, allowing users to freely switch identities and flows, thereby weakening the monopolistic power of any single platform. On this issue, maintaining factual boundaries is equally important: currently, we do not have reliable data on Firefly's user growth, usage duration, or underlying technical performance, nor do we have public details about its funding background or business model, so it can only be seen as an observable choice by Vitalik rather than an overextended qualitative judgment about the product's prospects or technical advantages.

Lens and Farcaster: Long-term Bets on Protocols and Communities

In contrast to his criticism of short-term plays, Vitalik is more cautious when explicitly recognizing projects. He clearly acknowledges the Aave team's long-term maintenance of the Lens protocol and expresses optimism about the new developments brought by the new team and Mask Network after taking over. This recognition is both an affirmation of technical continuity and an encouragement for governance and community inheritance. In his view, users should focus their attention on decentralized social ecosystems like Lens and Farcaster, rather than those short-term projects that promote "quick token issuance and price surges," because the former are attempting to build sustainable infrastructure in terms of protocol-level openness, developer community activity, and creator tool supply. At the protocol level, these projects emphasize data sovereignty and composability, ensuring that users' social relationships and content are not locked into a single front-end platform, allowing third parties to freely build products around the same social graph. On the developer side, open APIs, comprehensive documentation, and a relatively friendly secondary development space provide opportunities for external teams to enter, lowering the barriers to innovation and preventing the ecosystem from being entirely dependent on a single company's direction. In terms of creator tools, these protocols attempt to provide more foundational capabilities around identity management, content distribution, fan relationships, and multi-platform interactions, rather than merely treating creators as "traffic entry points." In such a system, if tokens do appear, they should primarily serve governance, incentives, and coordination roles, rather than being designed as the center of short-term price surges, aligning more closely with Vitalik's repeatedly emphasized vision of "serving long-term value."

Value Return or New Round of Speculation: Who Dominates the Narrative

Vitalik's return will inevitably be seen by the market as a strong signal, which could either generate construction momentum or be repackaged as ignition material for the "social market trend." Once "the Ethereum founder bets on decentralized social" is simplified into a popular slogan, some project teams may choose to continue using familiar scripts: quickly launching tokens, accompanied by strong social media promotion, treating integration with Lens and Farcaster as a packaging highlight, redirecting discussions originally about public goods back to price curves. An alternative route is to view this wave of attention as a window period, recalibrating resource investment, focusing on protocol robustness, identity and data migration capabilities, and creator experience—challenging but necessary engineering issues—allowing the ecosystem to truly form sustainable development and usage inertia over a two to three-year scale. For users, developers, and investors, a basic path to identify long-termism signals in the new narrative is to observe how a project allocates attention and resources: does it leave the most space for "how to raise prices," or for "how to ensure users can truly migrate freely with their data"; does it only care about early traffic sprints, or is it willing to invest in long-term iterative toolchains and infrastructure? If a project is willing to openly discuss details of protocol governance, cross-platform interoperability, and developer support, rather than just telling stories about token price fluctuations, its position in this narrative is often closer to what Vitalik calls for: "long-term value builders."

When Founders Speak Again: The Next Act of Decentralized Social

From a value orientation perspective, the key signal conveyed by Vitalik's return is an attempt to shift the discussion from price games back to public goods and long-term value. He does not deny the necessity of incentive mechanisms but emphasizes that social protocols are primarily a form of social infrastructure, and their evaluation criteria should be whether they can protect individual expression, decentralize discourse power, and platform authority, rather than whether they can generate multiple returns in a short period. In the coming years, protocols like Lens and Farcaster will experience more intense competition across multiple dimensions: at the user level, they need to prove that they are not just "geek toys" but can provide actual value in experience and network effects that differ from traditional platforms; at the developer level, the ecosystem must continuously attract new application and tool builders, rather than falling silent after the initial hype fades; at the regulatory level, finding a balance between open data and privacy protection, and explaining the boundaries of this new type of social interaction to regulators, will be unavoidable issues. For readers, if choosing to participate in this round of decentralized social experiments, a more meaningful role is to see oneself as an ecosystem participant rather than a distant observer betting on price fluctuations: it could be an ordinary user willing to try establishing a new identity on Lens or Farcaster, a developer creating small tools, plugins, or bot scripts around these protocols, or a funder prioritizing protocol design and community governance when evaluating projects, rather than just looking at token liquidity. When founders speak again, the real difference lies not in how many short-term opportunities they bring but in whether we are willing to shape a social world different from the old platform logic through participation.

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