One of the most renowned voices in the crypto space is that of Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum.
Early Tuesday morning, Buterin posted on Twitter that people should not just discard everything that Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of FTX, did in the said ‘fraud’.
SBF
Buterin said that writing off everything that the founder of FTX had done would be a mistake. Instead, he said that it was better to figure out the things that actually led to the fraud and the ones that did not.
Ethereum’s co-founder has been quite vocal in his criticism of Bankman-Fried since the chaos began that resulted in the price of FTT, the native token of FTX, plummeting and the company filing for bankruptcy.
Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX are currently under investigation by five government agencies in the US for alleged fraud.
These include the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Last week, Buterin was in Argentina for a conference and he had talked about Bankman-Fried, saying that he was similar to the dictator in the 1930s, considering the cult of personality he had.
Different stance
Buterin appeared to change his stance a bit and said that he wants people to evaluate the life choices of the crypto entrepreneur critically.
He said that all of SBF’s beliefs and practices, such as playing video games, need not be scorned, as there is also ‘effective altruism’.
This concept was touted frequently by Sam Bankman-Fried and those at Alameda, which is based on the philosophy of using reasoning and evidence for improving the lives of people.
Emin Gun Siren, the chief executive of Ava Labs, believes this no longer applies. He responded to Buterin and said that the effective altruism brand had just been a cover for greed and fraud.
The CEO said that the philosophy of SBF was just shallow and was not worth defending.
More opinions
A similar view was expressed by the co-founder of Gnosis, a DeFi firm. Martin Koppelmann said that using effective altruism to justify everything was downright dangerous.
He said that it could be used for justifying everything that earns money because it is believed to be good for everyone.
Buterin said that he agreed with this stance because it eventually resulted in the downfall. Will MacAskill, an Oxford philosopher, had been the biggest supporter of the EA strategy of SBF.
He had been an advisor at the Future Fund of FTX and he has published a statement addressing the topic.
He said that he was ashamed if all of that had been used for committing fraud. He admitted that there had been concerns, both internal and external, about the use of EA that could be harmful.
He added that he had believed that while those concerns should be taken seriously, he thought they were unlikely and speculative for the most part.
He concluded that he could have been wrong, considering what has happened at FTX and the things that are coming to light.