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

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.