Buterin’s acquisition and use of a Miladys NFT on his social media accounts X and Farcaster comes at a time when the Ethereum community has expressed a number of concerns about the network’s trajectory and leadership.
Posted January 21, 2025 at 3:55 pm EST.
A simple change by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin of his social-media profile pic has kindled optimism among members of the blockchain’s community that he might be stepping into a more active leadership role of the ostensibly decentralized network.
In recent days, Buterin chose an NFT from the Ethereum-based Milady Maker collection as the avatar for his accounts on X and Farcaster. (Blockchain data suggests that a Buterin wallet address acquired the NFT as recently as Jan. 18.)
Posters on X have hailed the Miladys collection as representative of the “cypherpunk ethos,” and interpreted the move by Buterin as a sign that he’s moving into “wartime mode” as concerns mount that the blockchain might be lacking in direction or lagging in progress relative to competing networks including Solana and Bitcoin.
Buterin’s use of a Miladys NFT appears to be an effort to “resonate hard with grassroots ETH community,” one Milady holder told Unchained over Telegram. The person asked to remain anonymous to avoid getting in trouble with their employer.
Reaching a Breaking Point
A key data point is just how drastically Ethereum’s native cryptocurrency, ETH, has underperformed relative to Solana’s SOL and bitcoin. The ETH price is basically flat on the year, after gaining 46% in 2024. That compares with SOL, which is up 34% this year after gaining 86% last year. Bitcoin (BTC) is up 14% in 2025 after more than doubling last year.
Members of the Ethereum community have raised concerns and quarreled over the performance of ETH, the Ethereum Foundation’s onchain transactions involving the sale of ETH, a perceived lack of strong leadership within the nonprofit organization, whether layer 2 networks that settle transactions on Ethereum are “parasitic” to the parent, and the stiff competition from Solana as a rival blockchain platform.
Read More: Ethereum Accounts to Post on Social Media More After Criticism
“We been annoyed but quiet for years,” wrote Marc Zeller, the founder of Aave Chain Initiative, early Tuesday. “We reached a breaking point and they not gonna kinsugi this one.” The reference is assumed to be “kintsugi,” which refers to the Japanese art of using gold to repair broken pottery.
Stani Kulechov, founder of Aave, the leading decentralized-lending protocol on Ethereum, also has added a Miladys NFT to his profile on X, and in a post on Jan. 18 he wrote that “Ethereum needs wartime users.”
Ethereum needs wartime users.
Grab whatever you have and go fight.
— Stani.eth (@StaniKulechov) January 18, 2025
New Changes Coming
The Ethereum Foundation, where Buterin works, is in the process of setting up a multi-signature wallet bankrolled with 50,000 ETH to participate in DeFi.
Buterin wrote on X on Jan. 18 that the Ethereum Foundation is “indeed currently in the process of large changes to EF leadership structure, which has been ongoing for close to a year.”
Goals for the foundation include improving the “level of technical expertise within EF leadership,” improving “two-way communications and ties between EF leadership and the ecosystem actors” and bringing in “fresh talent.”
He listed what he described as “explicit *non-goals*” for the Ethereum Foundation – to “execute some kind of ideological / vibez pivot from feminized wed soyboy mentality to bronze age mindset” or to “become a highly centralized org, or even more of a ‘main character’ within Ethereum.”
Former Ethereum Foundation researcher Danny Ryan, who left the foundation last year due to health issues, said on X, “Some of the discourse has turned counterproductive. These are real people attempting to sort through and do what is best… You’ve been heard, but vitriol is ultimately harmful to this process.”
A few days prior, Ryan pointed to Miyagotchi as playing a significant role in the “many reasons Ethereum has flourished over the years.”
In addition to calling some of the online comments directed at Miyagotchi as “pure evil,” Buterin asserted his authority by saying, “The person deciding the new EF leadership team is me.”
Believe in Cypherpunk Ethos
Buterin’s use of a Milady profile picture is “a beautiful moment,” wrote @0xMontBlanc Tuesday on X.
“Milady is the most valuable thing on Ethereum because she stands for something that can’t be bought,” the commenter wrote. “Post-authorship, abundance mentality, 1000 year legacy, virtue… Milady is the vessel that can make us interact online in meaningful ways, and most importantly prepare us for the aggressive technological shifts the world is going through.”
It bears saying that Buterin’s embrace of Miladys caused a spike up in prices for the NFT collection.
The floor price of a milady stands at 5.3 ETH (about $17,600) and is the sixth-largest NFT collection by market capitalization, at $181 million. The collection’s price floor was 3.78 ETH one week ago.
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On Tuesday, Charlotte Fang, creator of the Miladys collection, said Milady and Ethereum share a similar origin, namely a belief in the cypherpunk ethos and future.
“What Milady really brings back is the punk in cypherpunk,” Fang wrote. “Milady brings back both the irreverence and the violence of a revolutionary movement. Milady is a wartime pfp and crypto is a never ending war by design.”
While a crypto user can join the Milady community by acquiring the NFT onchain, Milady holders often encourage others to simply copy a Milady pfp and don the aesthetic as their avatar on social media without actually owning the digital asset onchain.
