Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently spoke about his biggest concerns about the crypto industry with TIME Magazine. Following the interview’s publication, Buterin responded to tweets that negatively compared his appearance to that of Tom Brady, retired NFL star and founder of the NFT marketplace Autograph.
The quote tweets on the new time article about me are truly amazing.
These are barely even cherry picked, it’s pretty much one piece of awesome after another. Highly recommend scrolling. https://t.co/teyd3ROqrT pic.twitter.com/BDzbwvekhw
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 18, 2022
Buterin viewed the critical comments as comical and even posted collages of the “highly recommended” tweets. He admitted he didn’t know who Tom Brady is, thinking he was being associated with actor Tom Cruise at first. That’s when Brady, who knew exactly who Buterin was, chimed in to express his gratitude and fandom towards the “prince of crypto.”
What’s up Vitalik! You may not know me but just wanted to say I’m a big fan of yours. thank you for everything you’ve built in the world of crypto, otherwise @Autograph wouldn’t have been possible. Hope I get to meet you some day you’re the https://t.co/W6PxS5P78M
— Tom Brady (@TomBrady) March 19, 2022
Brady praised Buterin as the G.O.A.T., a term used to describe those who are the “Greatest Of All Time” in their field, and often used in reference to Brady himself for being the only NFL player with seven championships under his belt. Brady acknowledged that Autograph “wouldn’t have been possible” without Buterin. Recently, Autograph closed on a $170 million funding round. Company reps stated at the time that it planned to use the funds to scale its NFT technology and expand its user base.
Buterin’s cover story is part of TIME’s first-ever entire issue released as an NFT on the blockchain. The decentralized magazine edition will be available on March 23. As part of the magazine’s push for Web3 initiatives, it began accepting payment for digital subscriptions in Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) as well as Ripple (XRP), Dogecoin (DOGE) and other cryotocurrencies. TIMEPieces, the NFT arm of the company, tweeted on Sunday that it will soon add ApeCoin, the governance and utility token of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (APE) to its list of accepted cryptocurrencies.
Related: Time Studios talks legacy media and the rise of NFTs
Buterin referred to BAYC during the interview when discussing the tendency of those within the industry to publicly display wealth associated to crypto and NFTs. “The peril is you have these $3 million monkeys and it becomes a different kind of gambling,” he said.
Despite being unimpressed with public figures like Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon shilling their own Bored Apes or people “just buying yachts and Lambos,” Buterin did admit to “one silver lining.” Russian-born Buterin wrote to TIME that all of the recent blockchain-based efforts to aid the Russia-Ukraine crisis have served to remind the crypto community “that ultimately the goal of crypto is not to play games with million-dollar pictures of monkeys, it’s to do things that accomplish meaningful effects in the real world.”