Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin says it’s a mistake to dismiss everything FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried did despite ‘fraud’

• Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin cautioned critics of FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried to be more discerning.
• “Automatically downgrading every single thing SBF believed in is an error,” he tweeted on Tuesday.

Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin cautioned critics of FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried to be more discerning, even as he suggested the crypto exchange’s collapse was due to fraud.

Buterin, a vocal supporter of widespread crypto adoption and blockchain technology, said it would be a mistake to dismiss everything Bankman-Fried did, even as his crypto empire collapses amid federal probes into the potential mishandling of customer funds.

“Automatically downgrading every single thing SBF believed in is an error,” Buterin tweeted. “It’s important to actually think and figure out which things contributed to the fraud and which things didn’t.”

Market commentators have compared the FTX crash to the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy as well as infamous cases of fraud like Theranos, Bernie Madoff and Enron.

After failing to secure a rescue, FTX and 130 affiliates last week filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and Bankman-Fried stepped down from his position as CEO.

Still, for those who do broadly dismiss SBF, Buterin appeared to reference Adolf Hitler, who was a vegetarian.

“Don’t be the guy who would have tried to cancel vegetarianism in 1945,” the crypto cofounder wrote.

—vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) November 15, 2022

When crypto markets went into freefall earlier this year, Buterin tried to find a silver lining. After the token Terra had collapsed in May, he said that was something that could actually bode well for the sector.

He wrote in a blog post that the turmoil could be an opportunity to go back to “principles-based thinking,” and warned against expectations for limitless growth in the cryptocurrency market.

Buterin urged investors to “evaluate how safe systems are by looking at their steady state, and even the pessimistic state of how they would fare under extreme conditions and ultimately whether or not they can safely wind down.”