Last updated on March 11th, 2026 at 03:11 pm
Quick Breakdown
- Vitalik Buterin warns that X’s new country-visibility feature poses privacy risks.
- Crypto leaders criticize the rollout for forcing location disclosure without consent.
- Some users highlight ways to opt out, while others argue the feature boosts platform integrity.
X’s latest transparency feature, automatically showing the country where an account is located, has sparked backlash across the crypto community, including from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who labelled the change “risky.”
The feature, announced Saturday by X’s director of product, Nikita Bier, was introduced to strengthen platform integrity and help users verify the origin of posts. But many argue it exposes people to new security threats.
Buterin: feature risks “retroactive privacy rugpull”
Responding to the rollout on Sunday, Buterin initially acknowledged potential benefits, such as helping users understand how different communities view issues. But after considering the implications, he sided with critics who warned of security concerns.
Prediction about this “show which country the account is from” thing:
In the short term it will have lots of positive effects.
In the medium term, the sophisticated actors will find ways to pretend to be from countries that they are not. Lots of ways to rent individual people’s…
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) November 23, 2025
He noted that some users, especially high-profile or high-net-worth individuals, are at greater risk if their location becomes more identifiable.
Crypto executives call mandatory disclosure “psychotic”
Uniswap founder Hayden Adams was blunt in his criticism, saying he “hates” the feature and calling mandatory location disclosure “psychotic.”
Summer.fi CTO Andrei David argued that the issue isn’t the country label itself, but that X forced visibility on all users without notice.
“A privacy-sensitive feature should always start with the least revealing setting,”
he said.
While Bier said X provides a privacy toggle that switches the display from a precise country to a broader region, a feature designed for users in countries where political speech is punished, others highlighted more complete opt-out paths.
Web3 consultant “Langerius” shared steps to fully disable the feature in X’s privacy settings, offering an immediate workaround for those worried about exposure.
Some users see the feature as harmless or even helpful
Not everyone is alarmed. Several X users argued that revealing a location in a country as large as the U.S. does little to identify individuals. Others, including venture capitalist Nic Carter, said the feature could help curb foreign influence campaigns by preventing anonymous accounts abroad from posing as local citizens.
In separate news, Buterin has called for a global shift toward open-source, verifiable digital infrastructure across critical sectors such as healthcare, finance, and governance, warning that overreliance on centralized systems could undermine trust, security, and efficiency.
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