Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, clarified a tweet in which he threatened to leave crypto if communities in the space didn't grow up.

He said he would stay so long as "there's also real social value that the ecosystem is working towards."



Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, has clarified a tweet from Wednesday in which he threatened to leave crypto if communities in the space didn't grow up.

Originally, he said he would leave crypto if all people in the space did was post memes about how much money they had.

On Thursday he said "all" was the "operative word" in his original tweet, adding that he would continue to work in the space so long as it included communities working on something impactful. Here's Buterin in a tweet:

Buterin said coiners working on interesting projects should check to see whether they were eligible to receive funds from his adviser token donation fund. Buterin said the fund had distributed over $1 million.

"Never hurts to quietly put up an ETH address," he added.

The market for digital coins has exploded this year, with bitcoin and Ethereum leading the way, up more than 8,500%.

Ethereum has also paved the way for hundreds of so-called initial coin offerings, a cryptocurrency twist on the initial-public-offering process. Autonomous Next, a fintech analytics firms, estimates that over $4 billion has been raised via ICOs, which help startups raise capital outside traditional financial services.

In total, the market for digital coins has exploded from just under $18 billion at the start of the year to a whopping $580 billion, according to data from CoinMarketCap.com.

Buterin has questioned whether the crypto space deserves these eye-popping gains based on what it has given back to society.

"So total cryptocoin market cap just hit $.5T today. But have we *earned* it?" he said in a tweet earlier this month.