Vitalik Buterin claws back crypto community's right to redefine 'inflation'

The Ethereum co-founder asserts the crypto community’s right to redefine "inflation" as the increase in currency supply, challenging traditional economic definitions and addressing misinformation.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has asserted that the crypto community has already “claimed the right to butcher” the word inflation. 

Buterin’s comments come as a response to an X post by digital media company Axios, which stated that the word “inflation” now means high prices rather than rising costs. 

Despite the Axios post’s “tongue-in-cheek” nature — as X Community Notes (CN) suggests — CN clarified that “the definition of inflation is not changing.”

Buterin’s Farcaster post debated Axios’ definition of inflation by insisting that the crypto community had already established the redefinition of the word.

“[…] we already decided that it now just means ‘increase in the total supply of a currency’.”

Buterin’s rebuttal to the Axios post found support from other Farcaster users, including ex-Coinbase employee Binji.eth.

Traditionally, inflation refers to the rise in the general price level of goods and services, which reduces purchasing power because money is worth less.

However, the semantic shift in culturally redefining inflation — as described by Buterin — suggests that ongoing global inflation results from the “total supply” essentially being uncapped.

Related: Ethereum validator P2P.org enables ETH restaking on EigenLayer

Tech investor Lee Edwards criticized the Axios initial tongue-in-cheek X post, saying:

“You could educate your readers instead of confirming their misconceptions.”

Buterin has recently taken to Farcaster multiple times, pushing for community-centric solutions and initiatives prioritizing privacy preservation and exploitation fixes.

From proposing remedies to Ethereum’s miner extracted value (MEV) problem to advocating for zero-knowledge (ZK) proof social media augmentation, Buterin’s involvement in the decentralized community should be no surprise.

However, he has yet to comment on the growing community concerns regarding Ethereum Foundation researchers Dankrad Feist and Justin Drake’s joining the ranks of EigenLayer.

The decision to become Advisors at EigenLayer in exchange for substantial compensation in EIGEN tokens sparked significant debate in the crypto community.

Some community members supported the transparency of the disclosures, while others slammed the decision, suggesting that the “huge compensation” would influence decision-making.