Vitalik Buterin Says Creator Coins Miss The Real Problem

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is once again challenging a popular crypto narrative, this time around creator coins. In a recent post, Buterin argued that creator coins have largely failed, not because creators lack incentives, but because the real bottleneck in today’s internet is filtering for high-quality content, not producing more of it.

According to Buterin, the assumption that creators need stronger financial incentives is outdated. In the early 2000s, the internet struggled with a shortage of content. Today, the opposite is true. Content is abundant, cheap, and increasingly generated by AI at scale. The challenge now is surfacing what is worth paying attention to.

His critique lands at a time when crypto-native creator platforms continue to experiment with tokenized attention, tipping mechanisms, and social tokens, often with disappointing long-term results.

Why Content Incentives Worked Before And Fail Today

Buterin frames the issue as a structural shift across internet eras. In the 2000s, incentivizing content creation made sense. Platforms needed more blogs, videos, and voices. In the 2020s, AI can generate near-infinite content for minimal cost. Quantity is no longer scarce, quality is.

That distinction explains why a decade of crypto-based content incentive experiments has struggled to produce lasting success. From early platforms like Bihu and Steemit, to BitClout in 2021, to more recent models like Zora and decentralized social tipping, the core problem remains unsolved.

Most systems reward visibility, speculation, or existing fame rather than consistently elevating thoughtful, original, and high-signal work. As a result, creator coins often become financialized popularity contests instead of discovery mechanisms for new talent.

Buterin argues that this is not a failure of execution, it’s a failure of framing.

Substack As Proof That Curation Beats Tokens

To illustrate what does work, Buterin points to Substack as the most successful example of creator incentives in the past decade. At first glance, Substack looks simple: users pay a monthly subscription to access a writer’s work. But its real advantage lies elsewhere.

Substack did not simply deploy a mechanism and walk away. In its early days, the platform was highly hands-on, deliberately seeding itself with writers chosen to fit a specific intellectual vision. The company offered selected creators revenue guarantees and actively curated the ecosystem it wanted to build.

Looking at Substack’s top creators, across technology, culture, and politics, Buterin argues that even critics would likely agree on two points: the authors are generally high-quality, and many would not have reached their current prominence without Substack’s support.

That curation, not tokenization, is what allowed Substack to surface pluralism and depth rather than amplify noise.

Why Creator Coins Keep Elevating The Wrong People

By contrast, creator coin platforms tend to elevate individuals who already possess high social status. Whether examining top creator coins on Zora or the rise and fall of BitClout, a consistent pattern appears: the most valuable tokens belong to people who were already famous, influential, or controversial before launching a coin.

Buterin stresses that this does not mean those individuals lack talent. Rather, their success is rarely driven by the content itself. Instead, value accrues through speculation, brand recognition, and social capital.

This creates a recursive loop where attention feeds price and price feeds attention—without any reliable mechanism for evaluating quality. In such systems, creator coins function less like tools for discovery and more like volatile social derivatives.

That dynamic explains why creator coins often struggle to onboard unknown but high-potential creators.

A New Model: Small DAOs Without Tokens

Rather than abandoning the idea entirely, Buterin proposes a different approach. His solution begins with small, non-tokenized DAOs, inspired by Protocol Guild.

These DAOs would consist of a limited number of members—ideally under 200—to keep governance manageable. Members could anonymously vote creators in or out. If a DAO grows too large, it could automatically split into smaller groups.

Crucially, these DAOs should not aim to be universal. Instead, they should embrace being opinionated. Each DAO might focus on a specific content format, style, region, or ideological lens. Initial members would be hand-picked to align closely with that vision.

The goal is to create a collective brand that can surface quality, bargain for revenue opportunities, and maintain standards—while avoiding the chaos of mass governance.

How Creator Coins Become Prediction Tools, Not Speculation

In Buterin’s model, creator coins still exist—but their role fundamentally changes. Anyone could create a creator coin. However, real value only emerges if the creator gains admission into one of these high-value creator DAOs.

Once admitted, a portion of the creator’s DAO revenue would be used to burn their creator coins. This flips the incentive structure entirely. Instead of speculators fueling attention for its own sake, they become predictors—betting on which creators DAOs will eventually accept.

In this system, speculators provide a real service: helping surface promising creators for DAOs to evaluate. Meanwhile, DAOs retain final authority, ensuring that quality judgment rests with experienced creators rather than market hype.

Buterin sees this as part of a broader trend: governance mechanisms that combine large-scale prediction markets with small, mission-aligned decision groups. Tokens measure expectations; humans make final calls.

As he puts it, the winners are not those who speculate the loudest, but those who best predict what high-quality creators will value.

Disclosure: This is not trading or investment advice. Always do your research before buying any cryptocurrency or investing in any services.

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