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 ideas for creator coin design, noting 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 current environment where AI can generate large amounts of content at low cost, industry goals should shift from “encouraging more content” to “identifying and amplifying high-quality content.”

Vitalik believes that Substack is a relatively successful example of creator incentives, primarily because it actively curates and supports high-quality creators rather than relying solely on mechanism design. He points out that existing creator token projects generally suffer from a structural problem where high social influence users dominate the leaderboards, which does not truly reflect content quality.

On the proposal level, Vitalik suggests 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 commercial bargaining power. Creators could also issue personal tokens; if they join the creator DAO, DAO profits could 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 with multi-party governance structures to enhance system resistance to manipulation and goal alignment.