Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has dropped a major critique of the current "Creator Coin" landscape. His verdict? The industry is solving the wrong problem.
🛑 The Failure of Incentives
For years, the crypto industry has tried to fix the "creator economy" by incentivizing more content. Buterin argues the core issue isn't a lack of supply—it’s a filtering crisis.
The Problem: Current models often amplify existing social status rather than actual content quality.
The Threat: In an era where AI can generate an "entire metaverse" for pennies, the challenge shifts from "how do we get more?" to "how do we find the good stuff?".
📰 The Substack Inspiration
Buterin points to Substack as a success story worth mimicking.
Substack didn't just rely on algorithms; it used proactive, hands-on curation to seed its initial platform with high-quality thinkers.
This deliberate human selection created an intellectual environment that purely speculative systems fail to achieve.
🛠️ The Solution: "Prediction, Not Speculation"
Vitalik proposes a radical new structure for creator economies:
Small, Non-Token DAOs: Establish highly selective, non-tokenized DAOs (similar to the Protocol Guild model) that act as quality gatekeepers.
Creator Coins as Prediction Tools: Instead of being purely speculative assets, personal creator coins would function as prediction markets for whether a creator will be accepted into these elite DAOs.
The Buyback-and-Burn: When a creator is admitted to a DAO, the DAO’s revenue is used to buy back and burn that creator’s tokens.
By anchoring token value to actual merit (acceptance by a selective DAO) rather than just "attention," we turn speculators into talent scouts.
Vitalik is calling for a move away from "recursive-speculation attention games" toward a system that values truth and quality.
Is this the future of SocialFi, or is curation too "centralized" for the Web3 dream? Let us know in the comments! 👇