Vitalik Buterin Says Crypto Apps Must Stop Paying Users To Exist - And The Data Backs Him Up

Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin said on Wednesday that most crypto token incentive programs from 2021 to 2024 functioned as "galaxy brain justification" for speculation rather than genuine user acquisition.

In a lengthy post on X, he argued that the industry's successful apps now grow by being useful, not by paying people indiscriminately to show up.

The comments came in response to a crypto user who claimed that apps cannot attract meaningful usage without airdrops or token rewards.

Buterin pushed back, citing his own father's regular use of Fileverse - a decentralized document platform - as proof that organic adoption of cryptocurrency applications is possible without financial incentives.

Good Incentives vs. Bad Ones

Buterin drew a distinction between two categories. Incentives that compensate for temporary, unavoidable costs of using immature technology - such as DeFi liquidity rewards that offset hacking risk in early-stage protocols - are economically sound, he said.

Incentives that attract users who would never engage with a mature version of the product are destructive. Paying people to post promotional content was the clearest example, he wrote, because it draws participants who "optimize for maximum laziness" and leave the moment rewards dry up.

Even when subsidized users stay, the damage may already be done. Buterin argued that quantity of community and quality of community are different goals. In DeFi, one ETH in a liquidity pool performs the same function regardless of who deposited it.

In social platforms or community-driven projects, that logic breaks down - higher-quality participants write open-source tools, answer questions, and become potential team members.

The Bubble Thesis

Buterin went further with what he called a "more cynical take." During 2021–2024, the real product for many projects was creating a speculative bubble, he wrote. Incentive programs existed primarily to inflate narratives, not to bootstrap networks.

He referenced his November 2025 essay on "galaxy brain resistance" — the idea that sufficiently clever reasoning can justify almost anything.

Any argument that token incentives help acquisition, he said, should be tested against the simpler explanation that the incentives just served a "pump and dump wearing a suit."

Why It Matters

The post arrives as airdrop farming remains a major activity in cryptocurrency. Multiple DeFi protocols and layer-2 networks distributed tokens worth hundreds of millions of dollars throughout 2024 and 2025, often to wallets that rapidly sold their allocations.

Buterin's conclusion was blunt: the bulk of the effort should go into making an actually useful app. That was historically ignored because narrative engineering, not product quality, drove speculative cycles.

But the projects crypto users "most appreciate and respect" now, he wrote, do the majority of their user acquisition that way.