Vitalik Buterin says crypto apps must move beyond “pay users or fail,” using incentives only to offset early risks while focusing on real utility and committed communities.

Once projects complete audits and establish trust within the sector, risk levels decline and high rewards become unnecessary, according to Buterin’s analysis.

The approach differs from paying users solely to generate activity or traffic, he stated. Paying all users during early growth phases can create long-term sustainability issues, as teams may incorrectly assume future profits will cover initial spending. Activity often drops once rewards end because many users joined exclusively for payouts, Buterin noted.

Aggressive reward campaigns risk undermining cryptocurrency communities, according to the post. Projects that compensate users for posting promotional content frequently produce unintended outcomes, with creators focusing on earning rewards rather than producing quality content. Activity typically declines when payments cease, as users lack incentives to continue platform engagement.

Buterin distinguished between decentralized finance applications and social platforms. In DeFi, capital functions uniformly regardless of provider, he stated. On social platforms, quality and active users carry more significance than user base size.

Committed community members often build tools, write documentation and answer forum questions without expecting rewards, according to Buterin. These contributions tend to strengthen projects over time, he stated.

Effective incentives should offset temporary weaknesses in early-stage products and decline as those weaknesses diminish, Buterin argued. Campaigns that pay users to inflate metrics can create appearances of adoption while failing to build sustainable communities.

“The bulk of the effort should be on making an actually-useful app. This was historically ignored, because it’s not necessary for narrative engineering to create a speculative bubble. But now it is necessary,” Buterin wrote.

The Ethereum co-founder argued that the cryptocurrency sector is gradually transitioning toward models driven by real utility rather than reward-led growth. Strong incentive structures compensate for early disadvantages and naturally phase out as projects mature, according to his statements.

As Valentine’s Day approaches, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Ohio is warning the public about a surge in romance scams that target people through online relationships and often lead to financial loss, including requests for cryptocurrency payments.

Criminals behind these schemes exploit victims’ trust and emotions by posing as romantic partners on dating sites, social media and messaging apps.

After building what appears to be a genuine relationship over weeks or months, scammers eventually ask victims for money, often under the guise of emergencies, travel costs or investment opportunities.

How crypto romance scams typically work

“Romance scammers are not looking for love — they are looking for money,” said U.S. Attorney David M. Toepfer. “They prey on trust and emotion … never send money to someone you have not met in person.”

According to the federal warning, fraudsters typically follow a pattern:

• They create fake profiles using stolen photos.
• Claim to work overseas in the military, oil rigs or business.
• Quickly profess deep feelings or commitment.
• Shift conversations off public platforms to private messaging.

Red flags include early declarations of love, excuses for not meeting in person, repeated “emergencies,” and unusual payment requests, especially gift cards, cryptocurrency or wire transfers.

Such scams have grown more sophisticated in recent years. In some cases, victims are directed to bogus investment platforms that promise unrealistically high returns before the scammers disappear with funds.

National reports have found that romance and confidence scams accounted for significant losses, often involving cryptocurrency transactions.

Cryptocurrency wallet makers and security companies are pushing out post-quantum products even though large-scale quantum computers capable of breaking Bitcoin do not exist yet.

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finalized its first post-quantum cryptography standards in 2024 and called for migrations before 2030.

As standards bodies plan for a gradual cryptographic transition, parts of the wallet market are already monetizing that future.

“I do feel that it is a bit of a fear tax. We know that quantum computers are far away — still five to 15 years away,” Alexei Zamyatin, co-founder of Build on Bitcoin (BOB), told Cointelegraph.

Bitcoin is trading roughly 50% below its October 2025 all-time high. Among the handful of theories attempting to explain crypto’s recent decline is a growing concern that quantum computing risks may be deterring institutional capital from Bitcoin.

The quantum risk is not zero, and it is not sudden

The quantum vulnerability often discussed is Bitcoin’s Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm, which authorizes transactions. In theory, a powerful quantum computer could derive a private key from an exposed public key and claim the coins sitting in an address.

Today’s quantum hardware isn’t capable of breaking the elliptic curve signatures. But that doesn’t mean threat actors are waiting around for a technical breakthrough.

“Many users expect a single ‘Q-Day’ in the future when cryptography suddenly fails. In reality, risk accumulates gradually as cryptographic assumptions weaken and exposure increases,” Kapil Dhiman, CEO and co-founder of Quranium, told Cointelegraph.

“Harvest now, decrypt-later strategies are already active, meaning data and signatures exposed today are being collected against future capability,” he said.

Related: What if quantum computers already broke Bitcoin?

In Bitcoin’s case, the concern is for older exposed public keys. Once a public key appears onchain, it remains permanently visible. Modern address formats obscure public keys until coins are spent.

CoinShares Bitcoin researcher Christopher Bendiksen said that just 10,230 Bitcoin (BTC) sit in addresses with publicly exposed public keys that would be vulnerable to a sufficiently powerful quantum attack.

The quantum fear business

While the Bitcoin community debates how far away quantum computing is, crypto wallet makers are operating on their own clock.

Trezor’s Safe 7 is marketed as a “quantum-ready” hardware wallet. Separately, qLabs recently introduced the Quantum-Sig wallet, which it claims embeds post-quantum signatures directly into its signing process.

BOB’s Zamyatin argued that wallet-level defenses would not solve Bitcoin’s quantum risk. Bitcoin transactions are authorized using a signature scheme embedded in the protocol itself. If that cryptography were ever broken, the fix would require a protocol-level change.

“I personally wouldn’t invest a lot of money into a quantum wallet right now because I don’t even know what protection it gives me for Bitcoin. It can’t really give me any protection, in my opinion, because Bitcoin doesn’t have a quantum-resistant signature scheme yet.”

Ada Jonušė, executive director at qLabs, agreed that full quantum resilience requires protocol-level defense. However, brushing off modern infrastructure as a fear tax overlooks the transitional nature of security upgrades.

“Quantum risk is not binary. Even before a protocol-level migration occurs, there is a real ‘harvest now, decrypt later’ threat,” she told Cointelegraph, claiming that qLabs’ approach reduces exposed key surface.

“Quantum readiness is about proactive infrastructure planning, not fear monetization,” Jonušė said.

Related: Bitcoin’s quantum countdown has already begun, Naoris CEO says

Trezor also admitted that blockchains themselves need to change their cryptography and protocol. But Tomáš Sušánka, the company’s chief technology officer, told Cointelegraph that wallets can implement protections right away instead of waiting for protracted blockchain upgrades.

“Once the blockchains upgrade, wallets must also support the same algorithms to remain compatible,” Sušánka said. He added that Trezor Safe 7 uses a post-quantum algorithm to protect against future quantum computers forging digital signatures and signing malicious firmware updates.

Market incentives and Bitcoin’s governance hurdle

Unlike iPhones, which are released almost every year, hardware wallets and other security products typically have multi-year product lifecycles. Introducing post-quantum features in a new product gives a reason for customers to buy a new device, even if the threat is distant.

“Yes, parts of the crypto industry do have incentives to amplify quantum risk, but that incentive is increasingly driven by regulatory and institutional alignment, not short-term sales alone,” said Dhiman, whose Quranium powers the Qsafe wallet.

“For most users, quantum-secure wallets today function as long-term insurance. The responsible approach is to acknowledge the transition ahead, avoid urgency driven by fear and choose systems designed to evolve without forcing abrupt replacements.”

Several blockchains are advancing with post-quantum strategies, but Bitcoin has been relatively hesitant. Some of the network’s most influential voices have brushed off the threat as a problem for the future.

Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum has a widely recognized figurehead. Co-founder Vitalik Buterin has advocated for post-quantum preparations, and the network has been steering in that direction.

For Bitcoin, the issue is social consensus, coordination and the willingness to act, according to Zamyatin.

“It’s not like [Bitcoin has] one person that everyone will follow. It will require a broad social consensus, which is very hard to achieve,” he said.

Wallet makers agree that full quantum protection has to come from the protocol. But even if the risk is years away, they can act as insurance to help investors sleep better at night, though some argue they amount to a fear tax.

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