Vitalik Buterin Calls for DAO Overhaul to Fix Token Voting and Oracle Weaknesses

Overview

• Ethereum’s co-founder argues most DAOs have drifted into token-controlled treasuries that are inefficient, capture-prone, and far from the original autonomous governance vision.
• Buterin warns that token-based oracle models cap their own security at market value, leaving stablecoins, prediction markets, and DeFi systems vulnerable when large capital is at stake.
• He highlights five priority use cases for improved DAO design: robust oracles, on-chain dispute resolution, shared safe lists, rapid short-term funding, and long-term project maintenance.
• To counter privacy loss and decision fatigue, he urges adoption of zero-knowledge voting and, where needed, MPC or fully homomorphic encryption to keep inputs confidential yet verifiable.
• He says AI should reduce cognitive load and assist human judgment rather than act autonomously, and he calls for stronger communication layers alongside governance engineering as the community’s next focus.