Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, attacks MicroStrategy chief Michael Saylor for suggesting crypto consumers utilize big banks to store Bitcoin
Vitalik Buterin called Michael Saylor “batshit insane” in an X post over his Bitcoin views in a Madison Reidy interview. He disputes Saylor’s claim that he was “explicitly arguing for a regulatory capture approach to protecting crypto.”
Saylor disagreed because Saylor’s theory indicates that regulated public enterprises should possess digital assets to attract regulators and law enforcement. Major financial organizations may acquire Bitcoin through regulatory capture.
Many others, including Bitcoin custody firm Casa’s chief security officer Jameson Lopp and ShapeShift founder Erik Voorhees, agreed with Buterin that encouraging people to use third-party custodians could negatively affect crypto’s decentralized nature.
“There’s plenty of precedent for how this strategy can fail, and for me, it’s not what crypto is about,” Buterin wrote.
In an interview with financial markets writer Madison Reidy, on Oct. 21, Saylor criticized “crypto-anarchists,” non-regulated businesses that don’t pay taxes or register. He thinks they enhance digital asset seizure risk.
Instead, Saylor advised Bitcoin holders to trust “too big to fail” banks “engineered to be custodians of financial assets.” It appears that his latest views contradict his crypto self-custody advocacy.
Self-custody means people protect their assets, not banks or exchanges.
Saylor told Blockware in 2022 that most individuals, families, and small to medium organizations prefer private keys or multi-sig deals to dealing with huge banks.
“I don’t think it’s a problem, I think everybody will be able to take custody of their Bitcoin,” said Saylor.
Blockware reports that Saylor’s statements occurred three weeks after FTX’s collapse, which left customers losing billions of BTC and sparked the legal conflict.
MicroStrategy has 252,220 BTC, the largest corporate Bitcoin reserve. Saylor said he owns about $1 billion in Bitcoin as of August 2024.