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A recent post by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin on creator coins has sparked fresh debate, with experts agreeing on the problem but split on how to fix it.
In his post, shared on Feb. 1, Buterin argued that the biggest problem in today’s creator economy is no longer motivating people to create content. Instead, he said the challenge is finding quality in a world flooded with posts, videos, and AI-generated material.
“In the 20s, there's plenty of content, AI can generate an entire metaverse full of it for like $10. The problem is quality. And so your goal is not *incentivizing content*, it's *surfacing good content*,” he wrote.
To fix that, Buterin proposes a different approach: Curated DAOs that decide which creators matter. Buterin said tokens would still exist, but mainly as prediction tools, allowing people to bet on which creators these groups will choose.
“So the ultimate decider of who rises and falls is not speculators, but high-value content creators (we make the assumption that good creators are also good judges of quality, which seems often true),” Buterin said.
Experts are Divided
Some builders said the idea is a step forward, but still falls short. Oxytocin, head of ecosystem at Umia, explained that while Vitalik’s solution “introduces a level of welfare creation through prediction markets,” it still lacks “a proper offchain enforcement mechanism,” leaving token holders with little assurance that creators will remain aligned over the long term.
He added that creators could even potentially ignore prediction markets after being admitted to the creator DAO.
Others were more supportive of Buterin’s focus on curation. Marcin Kazmierczak, co-founder of RedStone, said the proposal improves how incentives work.
“The prediction market doesn’t just create speculation; it creates informed discovery,” he said. “Token holders win by accurately predicting which creators DAOs will value, which means they have incentives to actually discover quality rather than chase attention metrics.”
However, Neil Staunton, CEO and co-founder of Superset, took a more skeptical view. “The diagnosis is correct, but the cure may be worse than the disease,” he said. “DAOs have consistently struggled with governance capture, voter apathy, and insider dynamics; now we're asking them to be arbiters of creative quality?”
He added that prediction markets only work when outcomes are objectively verifiable. “You're building a prediction market on subjective taste filtered through DAO politics,” he said. “The real question is whether creative work should be tokenized at all, or whether we're forcing a financial primitive onto something that doesn't need one.”
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