Solana Foundation Weighs In on Racist Meme Coin Controversy 

The recent proliferation of meme coins on the Solana blockchain with racist themes and offensive names has ignited a heated debate within the cryptocurrency community.

During a panel discussion at the BUIDL Asia summit in Seoul, experts weighed in on the issue. They discussed whether wallet apps, decentralized exchanges, and nodes should take steps to screen out or block tokens containing banned words and racist content.

Key points:

• Meme coins with names containing the N-word and other racist themes have become a growing concern in the crypto space.
• Panelists debated the role of wallet apps, decentralized exchanges, and nodes in filtering out offensive tokens.
• Austin Federa of the Solana Foundation argued that wallet developers should have the right to institute block lists.
• Marc Zeller of the Aave Chan Initiative pointed out that different cultures have varying approaches to content moderation.

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Solana Foundation drew parallels between crypto ecosystem and internet

Austin Federa, head of strategy at the Solana Foundation, drew a parallel between the crypto ecosystem and the internet. He argued that it is unreasonable to expect an internet service provider (ISP) to filter out potentially offensive content.

He emphasized that Solana operates on the application level, with wallets making decisions about the content they want to display. Federa stated, “Choice means the right for a wallet developer to institute a block list. Almost every wallet in every ecosystem filters out spam NFTs and spam tokens. Users always have the ability to reveal something if they want to, but the core network needs to remain permissionless.”

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On the other hand, Marc Zeller, founder of the Aave Chan Initiative, highlighted that in some countries, such as France, ISPs have legal obligations to block certain types of content, such as Holocaust denialism.

Federa also mentioned that the law already requires validators and nodes to filter some content. He cited the example of the OFAC imposing sanctions on Tornado Cash and certain crypto wallets.