Vivaldi CEO and Opera co-founder Jon von Tetzchner says cryptocurrencies should have been banned, arguing they let companies exert outsized political influence. He compares the situation to unregulated user profiling in ads and content algorithms, and separately flagged unease with AI companies now asking to be regulated.
Jon von Tetzchner, the Vivaldi browser CEO who co-founded Opera, says cryptocurrencies should have been banned because they let cryptocurrency companies exert excessive political influence.
A longtime critic doubles down
Von Tetzchner made the claim in a recent social media post, tying the lack of oversight to consequences for society. According to U.Today: "There are consequences from lack of regulation," he wrote.
He drew a parallel to another industry he says went unchecked. Von Tetzchner argued the same logic should have applied to user profiling for ads and content algorithms, writing that society is now living with the fallout of not regulating them.
This is not a new position for him. Back in January 2022, he published an extensive article explaining why Vivaldi would not add crypto features, at the time calling the space a pyramid scheme dressed up as currency. He also attacked Bitcoin's energy consumption and questioned whether cryptocurrencies had genuine real-world uses, and Vivaldi has ruled out a native crypto wallet on the grounds that it would push users toward what he called a gamble at best.
Notably, Opera, the browser he co-founded and no longer runs, took the opposite path and moved aggressively into Web3 and crypto features.
Turning the same lens on AI
Von Tetzchner then extended his regulatory argument to artificial intelligence. He noted that some AI companies are themselves now asking to be regulated, much like social media firms did before them, and asked what should be done about it.
The comment follows Vivaldi's broader stance against integrating generative AI into its browser. In August 2025, von Tetzchner said Vivaldi would resist the industry-wide push to turn browsers into AI assistants, ruling out an LLM chatbot or automatic summarization features. By the end of 2025, he said the company's own polling of its users showed overwhelming resistance to browser-integrated AI. Vivaldi says it currently has more than 4.2 million active users and more than 2.5 million community members.
Source: U.Today
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