Vitalik Buterin: Creator token incentives have limited effectiveness, primarily due to insufficient filtering of high-quality content.

News Brief

According to PANews on February 1st, Vitalik Buterin shared his perspective on creator coins through X, contending that crypto's decade-long push for content incentives has fallen short. The real challenge, he believes, isn't generating more content—it's discovering and elevating the truly valuable pieces. With AI now capable of producing massive amounts of content at minimal cost, the priority must shift from boosting quantity to identifying quality.He highlights Substack as an effective model, crediting its deliberate strategy of handpicking and supporting solid creators rather than relying solely on algorithmic curation. Current creator token projects suffer from a critical weakness: popular users dominate rankings without regard to actual content merit. To address this, Vitalik proposes establishing a non-tokenized Creator DAO where members vote on creators while maintaining clear standards and controlled expansion to build strong brands and negotiating leverage.Creators could still issue individual tokens; however, if they join the DAO, its revenue would buy back and burn those tokens. This mechanism would transform speculators into stakeholders betting on quality creators instead of merely flipping for quick gains. Overall, he envisions future governance combining prediction markets with multi-party frameworks to prevent manipulation and ensure alignment on shared objectives.

PANews reported on February 1st that Vitalik Buterin published an article on the X platform discussing the design concept of creator coins. He pointed out that the crypto industry's overall effectiveness in content incentives over the past decade has been limited. The core problem is not insufficient content supply, but rather a lack of mechanisms for selecting and discovering high-quality content. Given that AI can now generate large amounts of content at low cost, the industry's goal should shift from "incentivizing more content" to "identifying and amplifying high-quality content."

Vitalik believes Substack is a successful example of creator incentives, its key being proactively selecting and supporting high-quality creators through the platform, rather than relying solely on mechanism design. He points out that existing creator token projects generally suffer from a structural problem: "users with high social influence dominate the leaderboards," rather than truly reflecting content quality.

At the solution level, Vitalik proposed establishing a non-tokenized Creator DAO, where members would vote to select creators while maintaining clear content positioning and scale control to build stable brands and commercial bargaining power. Simultaneously, creators would be allowed to issue personal tokens; if they join the Creator DAO, the DAO's revenue could be used to buy back and burn these tokens, transforming speculators into "predictors of high-quality creators," thereby reducing pure speculative cycles and improving the efficiency of selecting high-quality content. Vitalik stated that future effective governance mechanisms may increasingly combine prediction markets with multi-party governance structures to enhance the system's resistance to manipulation and ensure goal consistency.