Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin harshly criticized current user acquisition strategies based on mass token distributions. He called on developers to focus on creating truly useful decentralized applications that retain users through quality service, rather than through financial promises. According to the programmer, the industry must move beyond buying user attention to create a sustainable and healthy ecosystem.

Buterin believes that monetary incentives can only be justified at the very beginning of a project, when the protocol is still considered "raw" and fraught with technical risks. In such cases, tokens serve as fair compensation to users for the inconvenience or potential losses during product testing. However, upon reaching maturity, any viable platform must abandon subsidies, as attracting "reward hunters" does not bring long-term value and only creates the illusion of popularity.

As a constructive example, Vitalik cited liquidity rewards in the DeFi sector, where payouts cover the risk of potential bugs and hacks. On the contrary, he considers the most destructive scenario to be direct payment for social media activity, which inevitably attracts bots and manipulators. This approach not only erodes the quality of the community but also encourages the growth of an audience seeking to game the algorithms for minimal gains without using the product's actual features.

Analyzing market cycles of past years, Buterin noted the "cynical nature" of the industry from 2021 to 2024, when speculative tokens often substituted for real products. Incentive programs at that time merely fueled inflating bubbles without creating fundamental value. Today, as the crypto market moves toward integration with artificial intelligence and other complex technologies, the Ethereum co-founder emphasizes the need to return to creating services that people will use consciously, as happened with the Fileverse project.