Vitalik Buterin Highlights Challenges in Stablecoin Decentralization

Vitalik Buterin calls for better decentralized stablecoins to tackle inflation and other issues.

The cryptocurrency market requires more advanced decentralized stablecoins to address long-term issues such as inflation, according to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

We need better decentralized stablecoins. IMO three problems:

1. Ideally figure out an index to track that’s better than USD price
2. Oracle design that’s decentralized and is not capturable with a large pool of money
3. Solve the problem that staking yield is competition…

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) January 11, 2026

The developer identified three main demands of the segment:

1. Stablecoins need an index that “is better than the dollar rate.”
2. A decentralized oracle resistant to capture by large pools is necessary.
3. The issue of competition for staking yield needs to be addressed.

“Tracking the US dollar is fine in the short term, but in my view, part of the sustainability concept should be independence even from this price ticker. What if hyperinflation occurs over a 20-year horizon?” Buterin noted.

In the absence of a secure oracle to protect against protocol capture, developers typically “inflate” the token’s value to make an attack prohibitively expensive. However, to maintain a high rate, the project must promise investors super-profits, extracting them through high fees. This makes using the protocol unprofitable.

Buterin described this situation as a “dead end,” as such systems lack “protection asymmetry”—in this case, both attack and defense of the protocol boil down to a “financial race.”

“This is one of the main reasons why I constantly oppose financial governance […]. And, of course, it is one of the main reasons why I do not intend to completely abandon DAOs,” he added.

In the context of staking, the programmer emphasized that even a couple of extra percentage points of APY negatively affect the coin. As possible solutions, he suggested:

• reducing the yield on coin lock-up to an “amateur” level of about 0.2%;
• creating a new category of staking with high returns but without the risk of penalties;
• finding a way to combine penalties for violations with the ability to use collateral assets.

The Ethereum co-founder reminded that stablecoins cannot be backed by a fixed amount of ETH, as in the event of a sharp price drop, rebalancing must be possible.

Earlier in January, Buterin compared Ethereum to BitTorrent and Linux in terms of scale and reliability.