Vitalik Buterin: By 2026, full return to decentralized social media; competition and decentralization are the starting points for improving public discourse

Odaily Planet Daily reports that Vitalik Buterin stated he plans to fully return to decentralized social networks by 2026 and believes that if we want to build a better society, we must have better large-scale communication tools. These tools should help people filter high-quality information and opinions, find consensus, and serve the long-term interests of users, rather than maximizing short-term interactions and emotional conflicts.

Vitalik pointed out that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the above issues, but enhancing competition is an important starting point, and decentralization is the key path to achieving competition: through a shared data layer, anyone can build different clients on top of it. He revealed that since the beginning of this year, he has started using decentralized social tools for reading and posting, with all content synchronized across platforms such as X, Lens, Farcaster, and Bluesky via Firefly.

He also criticized some crypto social projects for deviating from their original intentions, overemphasizing “token issuance” as innovation, and trying to create price bubbles around individuals to incentivize creators. However, practice shows that such models often reward existing social capital rather than content quality, and tokens have short lifecycles. Vitalik emphasized that money and social interaction are not inherently in conflict; the key is whether they truly serve the content itself, such as subscription-based support models, rather than speculative asset designs.

In his view, decentralized social should be driven by teams that genuinely care about the “essence of social interaction.” Vitalik acknowledged the Aave team’s previous long-term maintenance of Lens and expressed expectations for the new team’s direction, believing they are more focused on solving real social problems. He stated that in the coming year, he will speak more on decentralized social platforms and encourage more users to participate in ecosystems like Lens and Farcaster, to break free from the information confrontation environment of single platforms and explore new interaction forms.