Vitalik: The incentive effect of creator tokens is limited; the core issue lies in the insufficient filtering of high-quality content.

ChainCatcher News, Vitalik Buterin posted on X discussing the design ideas of creator coins, pointing out that over the past decade, the overall effectiveness of content incentives in the crypto industry has been limited. The core issue is not a lack of content supply, but rather inadequate mechanisms for filtering and discovering high-quality content. In the context of AI being able to generate large amounts of content at low cost, the industry’s goal should shift from “encouraging more content” to “identifying and amplifying high-quality content.”

Vitalik believes that Substack is currently a relatively successful example of creator incentives, primarily because it actively filters and supports high-quality creators through the platform, rather than relying solely on mechanism design. He notes that existing creator coin projects generally have a structural problem where “high social influence users dominate the leaderboards,” which does not truly reflect content quality.

On the solution level, Vitalik proposes establishing a non-tokenized Creator DAO, where members vote to select creators, maintaining clear content positioning and scale control to build a stable brand and bargaining power. Creators would also be allowed to issue personal tokens; if they join the Creator DAO, the DAO’s revenue can be used to buy back and burn the creator’s tokens, transforming speculators into “high-quality creator predictors,” thereby reducing pure speculation cycles and improving the efficiency of high-quality content filtering.

Vitalik states that future effective governance mechanisms may increasingly combine prediction markets and multi-party governance structures to enhance system resistance to manipulation and goal alignment.