Vitalik Buterin says his Polymarket trading paid $70,000 by fading the hype

Speaking at a crypto community meet-up in Chiang Mai, Thailand, Vitalik Buterin came back to a familiar theme: the tech is improving fast, but the most popular consumer apps still lean heavily on speculation.

When the conversation turned to prediction markets, Buterin said he has been using Polymarket as a real-money way to test whether crowd probabilities are getting carried away. Buterin said he watches for markets where fear or excitement pushes probabilities into what he called madness. When that happens, he tends to bet against the most extreme outcomes, not because he is certain, but because the pricing looks detached from reality. He joked that some of the best examples are the ones that read like headlines from an alternate universe, such as a Nobel Prize for Donald Trump or a sudden collapse of the dollar.

The Polymarket aside was a doorway into a bigger point. Buterin argued that the tech stack is in good shape for mass adoption. He cited a higher gas limit, progress on zkEVMs, and better wallets. The problem, he said, is the application layer. Years ago, the industry promised things like a decentralized Uber. Today, the cultural center of gravity often looks like meme coins.

He was equally blunt about SocialFi. Monetizing every interaction, he warned, invites spam and turns conversation into a grind. He pointed to Farcaster as an example of a project that leaned away from pure social mechanics and found more traction by focusing on wallets.

Looking forward, Buterin said Ethereum can become a financial layer for AI agents, since autonomous systems will need a native way to hold and spend money. Among the ideas he wants the ecosystem to prioritize: stablecoins linked to CPI rather than fiat, smarter DAOs that use prediction markets to choose strategies, and social networks where users own their connection graphs.