• Vivaldi CEO Jon von Tetzchner said cryptocurrencies should have been banned

• Von Tetzchner accused crypto companies of using financial clout to influence politicians

• Von Tetzchner called crypto a pyramid scheme posing as currency in January 2022

A Renewed Call for a Blanket Ban

Jon von Tetzchner, the co-founder of Opera and chief executive of privacy-focused browser maker Vivaldi, has repeated his position that cryptocurrencies should have been banned outright, arguing the industry now deploys its financial weight to sway lawmakers. In a recent social media post, the longtime Bitcoin (BTC) skeptic wrote that “there are consequences from lack of regulation,” framing digital assets as a case study in what happens when a powerful technology is left to police itself. The post sparking the exchange goes beyond crypto: he argued that user profiling for advertising and the content algorithms driving social feeds should also have been prohibited. “We should have banned user profiling for ads and content algorithms. We did not, and we live with the consequences to our societies and democracy,” he wrote. At the core of his crypto argument sits a lobbying accusation — that companies flush with cash are using their resources to shape legislation in their favor. He extended the same skepticism to artificial intelligence, noting that several AI firms are themselves requesting oversight. “Now the AI companies themselves, kind of like the social media companies, are asking to be regulated, as they seem unable to stop themselves. What to do?” he asked. As of publication, the comment remains a personal position rather than a policy proposal: no regulator has acted on it, no industry body has formally responded, and no immediate market reaction was recorded. Vivaldi, for context, says it counts more than 4.2 million active users and over 2.5 million community members — a modest but loyal base that gives the remarks an outsized platform in mainstream tech circles.

The statement is not an outlier but the latest installment in a position von Tetzchner has held for years. In January 2022, he published a lengthy article explaining why Vivaldi would refuse to follow rival browsers into crypto, dismissing the asset class as “a pyramid scheme posing as currency” and rejecting the tokenomics underpinning it. He argued that extreme volatility made cryptocurrencies unfit to function as money, attacked Bitcoin’s energy consumption, and questioned whether the technology had any practical real-world use. Vivaldi also ruled out adding a native wallet to its browser, on the grounds that doing so would push users toward something “at best a gamble and at worst a scam” — a framing that preys on the same FOMO-driven psychology he sees across speculative markets. The contrast with his own history at Opera is striking. The browser maker he co-founded moved aggressively into Web3, shipping a built-in crypto wallet on Android back in 2018 with support for Ethereum-based decentralized applications, later extending wallet functionality to desktop, and in 2024 folding its standalone crypto-browser experiments into the main desktop and mobile products. Von Tetzchner has been equally contrarian on AI: in August 2025 he said Vivaldi would not integrate an LLM chatbot or automatic summarization tools, and by the end of 2025 he cited the company’s own polling showing overwhelming user resistance to browser-embedded AI.

A Critic Outside the Adoption Wave

Our reading of the episode is that it captures a widening fault line between consumer-software veterans and an industry that has largely moved past them. The primary post itself centers the case on political influence rather than technical merit — a rhetorical shift worth noting, since the energy argument he led with in 2022 has weakened as mining migrates toward efficient designs and alternatives such as Proof of Capacity. The remarks carry no regulatory force, but they signal the skepticism retail browsers still face. Investors weighing the asset class independently can compare custody and platform options in our guide to the Best Crypto Exchanges.