"$BITE and most other coins being discussed on this forum are shitcoins, have no redeeming cultural or moral value," he told a little-known Reddit thread.
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Vitalik Buterin has broken his silence after offloading $700,000 of memecoins.
He dumped 500 trillion SHIKOKU tokens on Tuesday — netting $590,000 in the process.
CULT, MOPS and BITE were also in the firing line, and several of these illiquid altcoins saw double-digit price drops in the immediate aftermath.
All of these projects had decided to send some of their tokens to Buterin, presumably on the basis that he would never use them.
But Buterin may have been motivated to take action because he could be liable to pay income tax on airdropped tokens.
Ethereum's co-founder surfaced in a little-known Reddit called Testingtesting62831. And helping to explain why he went on his epic selling spree, Buterin wrote:
"$BITE and most other coins being discussed on this forum are shitcoins, have no redeeming cultural or moral value, and will probably lose you most of the money you put into them. I anti-endorse these projects to the greatest extent."
Buterin's warning appears to have fallen on deaf ears. One Twitter account that appears to be affiliated with BITE called his post "bullish" — not least because it would have drawn more attention to the altcoin project.
The message has also spurred a series of memes to emerge, with some investors opting to send even more BITE to his publicly known wallet.
His "anti-endorsement" of shitcoins comes despite the fact that ERC-20 tokens are incredibly easy to create on Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain in the world.
But there are signs that this activity could soon migrate over to Bitcoin.
Hot on the heels of Ordinals inscriptions allowing NFTs to be minted on the Bitcoin blockchain, some enthusiasts have started experimenting with so-called "BRC-20" meme tokens.
Ordinals involve making an inscription on a single satoshi — that's one hundred millionth of one Bitcoin.
The latest figures from Dune Analytics suggest that there have been 395,261 inscriptions so far. Of these, 31,692 happened on Thursday — a new daily record.
Dogecoin was the original memecoin all the way back in 2013 — and with an astronomical circulating supply, it was designed to mock Bitcoin.
But a sense of community soon formed, with DOGE's founders raising a cool $30,000 for Jamaica's bobsleigh team.
The good feeling didn't last long, however. By April 2015, Dogecoin founder Jackson Palmer announced he was stepping back from the project — and he called the crypto ecosystem "toxic."
All of that was a good six years before DOGE embarked on a dizzying rally that saw it surge 18,000% in a little under five months.
DOGE now remains one of the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap — and while developers insist they are working to make micropayments faster and cheaper, it may not meet Buterin's standards.
