etherum

Vitalik Buterin calls for a new DAO design for onchain disputes and governance
Jan 19, 2026
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says DAOs must move beyond simple token-voting treasuries and be redesigned to power core infrastructure like oracles and onchain courts.

Subscribe on Follow our 
     
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has called for new decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) designs, arguing that the sector needs more than token-voting treasuries if it wants to improve on traditional corporate and political structures. 
In a Monday X post, Buterin said that current DAOs often amount to “a treasury controlled by token holder voting.”
That model is widely copied but it is “inefficient, vulnerable to capture and fails utterly at the goal of mitigating the weaknesses of human politics,” he said.
Buterin argued that DAOs should solve specific infrastructure problems, starting with better oracles, onchain dispute resolution and long‑term project stewardship.
He also highlighted the need for DAOs for subjective disputes (such as insurance outcomes), maintain shared lists like anti‑scam registries and standard formats to spin up short‑lived funding vehicles and keep projects alive after core teams disappear.

Related: Vitalik calls for a ‘garbage collection’ function to stop Ethereum bloat
Concave vs. convex: different DAOs for different problems
​Buterin framed his thinking using his earlier “convex vs concave” governance lens. For “concave” problems, where compromise is “better than a coin flip,” DAOs should maximize robustness by aggregating input from many sources.
For “convex” problems that require decisive bets, he said it was more appropriate to allow strong leadership and treat decentralization to hold leaders to account, rather than a full replacement.
​To make such systems work in practice, DAOs must solve privacy issues and “decision fatigue,” Buterin said.
Without privacy, governance becomes a “social game,” and if participants are asked to vote constantly, engagement falls off after an initial burst of enthusiasm. He pointed to zero‑knowledge proofs and, in some cases, secure multi‑party computation and fully homomorphic encryption to secure privacy.
He also suggested that artificial intelligence could help reduce decision fatigue by supporting analysis or allowing users to delegate voting to locally controlled models, while cautioning against DAOs being run by AI.
Related: Why Ethereum’s ‘walkaway test’ and quantum readiness matter more than ever
Low turnout, whale capture and the case for next‑gen DAOs 
It's time to invest in #Ethereum #tramp @Vitalik @everyone #TrumpTariffsOnEurope #MarketRebound $ETH
{spot}(ETHUSDT)