Vitalik Buterin Proposes DAOs and Prediction Markets as Tools to Pay Creators
Vitalik Buterin, one of the founders of ETH, has proposed a new way to change the way creator tokens are issued. The goal is to move the focus from quantity to quality in content development.
Buterin on X recently that current platforms often reward people who produce a lot of content at the price of significant labor. This difficulty is getting worse as more and more AI-generated content becomes available.
Creator tokens, sometimes called content coins, are on the blockchain that let fans own a piece of a creator’s work. They come with benefits such as exclusive access or a percentage of earnings from posts, images, music, or videos.
Buterin did say, though, that these systems tend to favor well-known superstars or those with high social status, making it hard for new talent to get ahead solely on their skills.
BitClout and Zora are two existing platforms. On these platforms, famous people possess most of the top tokens. Friend.tech, a SocialFi program on Base, is another example. It lets authors make money from private chat rooms by tradeing keys that could be traded.
Critics said that speculation, not the value of the material, was what drove crucial prices. This caused the site to shut down in September 2024 later than activity dropped sharply and its native token lost 95% of its worth.
Putting Quality Before Quantity
To fix these difficultys, Buterin a mechanism in which content providers create their own tokens and apply to specialized DAOs.
Members of these decentralized autonomous groups would choose which entries to accept by voting on which creators or pieces they like best. People who wager on possible admissions in prediction markets would make money if their predictions match the DAO’s decision.
Once accepted, a creator’s tokens could go up in value when the burns some of them, which lowers the quantity and makes them more scarce. Buterin said that this system encourages speculators to identify promising individuals ahead, thereby crowdsourcing quality control.
Niche Focus for Long-Term Governance
Buterin said that DAOs shouldn’t try to dominate the entire market, but instead focus on specific niches. This could be specific types of content, such as short videos or long articles, or specific groups of people, such as those in a particular country or with similar political views.
Buterin added, “The goal is to have a group that is largeger than one creator and can build a public brand and negotiate for revenue opportunities, but small enough that internal governance is manageable.”
He went on to say that speculators are very significant to this ecosystem because they bring attention to excellent stuff. He said, “Individual speculators can stay in the game and do well as long as they can accurately predict what the creator DAOs will do.”
This mix of community governance and market-driven projections could assist creators get paid more fairly while avoiding the difficultys that come with . Buterin’s ideas may shape the next generation of tools for making money from content as blockchain technology continues to develop. This might provide more power to voices that aren’t heard as much in the digital economy.
