Vitalik Buterin has taken a controversial stance on governance tokens, arguing that governance is not a good reason for such tokens to be treated as “valuable.”

“The notion of ‘governance rights’ as a narrative for why a token should be valuable is pathological,” Buterin wrote on Twitter Tuesday. “You're literally saying, ‘I'm buying $X because later on someone might buy it from me and a bunch of other people to twist the protocol toward their special interests.’”

On the Ethereum network, governance tokens are a type of ERC-20 token typically issued by a DAO or decentralized community to be used as digital voting chips for various community proposals. The more tokens a person holds, the more voting power they have.