SocialFi’s new species: How does a 15-year-old dropout genius use Clout to recreate the internet celebrity economy?

Author: Luke, Mars Finance

The long-dormant SocialFi track is making waves again, and an application called Clout is rewriting the rules of "influence monetization."

Just today, this platform that allows users to issue personal tokens was officially launched. The market value of its first token $PASTERNAK rocketed through 80 million US dollars within 5 hours, instantly becoming the focus of the crypto market. The operator behind the dig - Ben Pasternak is not an unknown person. This serial entrepreneur who dropped out of school at the age of 15 to develop a popular social application and was selected into the Forbes 30 Under 30 at the age of 25 is trying to use Clout to inject the Internet celebrity economy. Encrypted genes.

It is worth noting that this experiment coincides with the golden window of the celebrity token craze. Starting with the Trump family’s series of tokens, social media influence is being quantified into tradable digital assets. What's special about Clout is that it simplifies the complex currency issuance process like creating a social account: binding social media authentication, credit card payment support, automatic allocation of internal and external trading mechanisms - this "Web2 Internet celebrity-friendly" design , may be bringing a lot of fresh blood to the encryption industry.

What is Clout?

The essence of Clout is a bold gene recombination experiment in the SocialFi field - it cleverly stitches together FriendTech 's social capitalization logic and Pump.fun 's low-threshold currency issuance mechanism , and ultimately hatches an "Internet celebrity version of Nasdaq".

Pattern breakdown:

1. FriendTech’s social fission gene

• Just like FriendTech converts Twitter fans into private domain traffic, Clout further "on-chain" the influence: creators issue personal tokens by binding their The “financial connection” of idols.

1. Pump.fun’s Liquidity Enhancement Technique

• Drawing on Pump.fun’s minimalist token issuance process, Clout allows creators to complete token creation within 5 minutes and control liquidity through internal and external disk mechanisms: pre-sale for internal disks (limited to intra-platform transactions), and access after external disks are opened. DEXs such as Raydium form a closed loop of price discovery.

Operation path:

• STEP 1 : Create username→Bind X account→X tweet verification (viral marketing)
• STEP 2 : Enter the token name/symbol → Set the total issuance amount
• STEP 3 : The system automatically reviews the number of fans → pays on-chain fees after passing → generates tokens
• STEP 4 : Fans deposit funds via credit card/Apple Pay/cryptocurrency wallet to participate in the internal pre-sale

This hybrid model not only retains the imagination of FriendTech's "social capital securitization", but also eliminates the encryption threshold through Pump.fun-style technology inclusion. While other platforms are still debating "what is more important, social or financial," Clout has used a standardized assembly line to push the Internet celebrity economy into the era of industrialized mass production.

Who is the founder?

Ben Pasternak is a 25-year-old Australian boy. The game "Impossible Rush" developed at the age of 15 broke into the Top 20 in the US App Store. The youth social platform Monkey founded at the age of 17 has more than 20 million users. At the age of 20, he turned to plant-based chicken nuggets. NUGGS takes over Walmart shelves. Now this entrepreneurial genius has entered the encryption field with Clout.

This seemingly jumping entrepreneurial trajectory actually hides a hidden logical line: standardizing abstract values . Whether it’s encapsulating teenagers’ social needs into video matching algorithms or reconstructing soy protein into “cyber chicken nuggets,” Ben is always deconstructing complex systems and transforming them into scalable commodities. And Clout is the standardized measuring instrument he installed for "personal influence" -when a social media account passes 100,000 fans verification, the system automatically generates a token contract, and the NUGGS factory presses plant protein into The shape of chicken nuggets essentially shares the same industrialized thinking.

The ultimate test product of this kind of thinking is the token PASTERNAK named after him. As the first example of Clout, it also received official support and forwarding from Solana. The market value of this token exceeded US$80 million within 5 hours of its launch, but it was clearly marked in the white paper as "0 positions held by the founder." This kind of deliberate stripping of interests is like setting up a control group in a laboratory: when the founder is completely untied from the value of the token, is the market enthusiasm a recognition of technical logic or a blind worship of celebrity IP?

Ben's ambitions obviously don't stop there. In a recent AMA, he compared Clout to "Wall Street + Hollywood in the Web3 era", trying to combine financial pricing and star dreaming into one. However, history always repeats itself: in the 1990s, the star card trading market collapsed due to excessive speculation; in 2023, Friend.tech's tokenized social graph experienced a sharp rise and fall. When Clout equips each Internet celebrity with a mini money printing machine, it may be more appropriate to ask: When traffic becomes a fixed asset on the balance sheet, will social media evolve into a more efficient value network, or will it degenerate into a full-scale battle? Participating in a financial reality show?

Analysis of celebrity coin issuance craze and business model

When Trump's MAGA token surpassed the valuation of his technology media group (DJT) with a market value of US$50 billion , the encryption market completely awakened - the capital mobilization power of celebrities has far exceeded the value of traditional physical assets. ability. The emergence of Clout is like installing a turbine engine for this "influential IPO" wave: it not only standardizes celebrity currency issuance into an assembly line operation, but also uses the double helix structure of legal currency entrance + enhanced liquidity to transform this wave. The crypto game escalates into a universal financial experiment.

1. Time: The “Perfect Storm” of Celebrity Tokens

The encryption market in early 2025 is undergoing a paradigm shift from "technical narrative" to "cultural narrative". The wealth-making myths of the presidential family one after another jointly verify an underlying logic: social media influence is programmable capital . Clout keenly captures this trend and lowers the currency issuance threshold to a minimalist operation of "binding a Twitter account + 10,000 followers". Its convenience even makes traditional financial IPOs look cumbersome.

2. Genetic recombination: hybrid evolution of FriendTech+Pump.fun+Moonshot

Clout's business model is essentially a synthetic organism with three genes:

• FriendTech’s social capitalization : Inheriting its core of tokenizing fan relationships, Clout solves the problem of liquidity fragmentation through standardized tokens (rather than fragmented keys). FriendTech's Key can only be traded within a closed ecosystem, while Clout tokens are automatically connected to DEXs such as Raydium after the internal pre-sale is completed, forming an open market price discovery mechanism.
• Pump.fun’s industrial currency issuance : absorbing its low-threshold feature of creating tokens in 5 minutes, but achieving compliance upgrades through “identity verification + legal currency entry”. While Pump.fun users are still worried about gas fees on the SOL chain, Clout's credit card payment channel has attracted a large number of Web2 Internet celebrities.
• Moonshot’s liquidity migration logic : It is worth mentioning that Ben is an investor in Moonshot. Moonshoot designed the “migration to DEX after the market value reaches the standard” mechanism, and Clout improved it into a “dual-track system of internal and external disks” - the initial accumulation of internal pre-sales Liquidity, PVP will continue after the external market is opened, and there is also the expectation of CEX in the future, forming a liquidity ladder from closed to open, avoiding the fate of a token collapse when it is listed.

3. Advantages of business model

Clout’s revenue structure demonstrates differentiated competitiveness from traditional social platforms:

• Creator side : Earn income through on-chain fees and 1% transaction fee. Compared with FriendTech's reliance on a single Key transaction commission, Clout's multiple charging models (such as internal trading fees and external trading liquidity sharing) are more adaptable to market fluctuations.
• Investor side : The legal currency deposit channel lowers the participation threshold and attracts the influx of Web2 users. This design is similar to how Alipay simplified the payment process by binding bank cards in its early days, bringing a large number of Web2 speculators to Web3.

4. Catalyst for the SocialFi track

The rise of Clout may become a turning point for the SocialFi ecosystem. Its innovative mechanism directly addresses the three major pain points of the industry:

• Liquidity dilemma : Traditional SocialFi platforms (such as Friend.tech) have lost users due to token liquidity fragmentation, while Clout has built a complete transaction link from pre-sale to secondary market through internal and external market linkage and CEX access.
• The user threshold is too high : The native encryption platform relies on wallet operations, while Clout’s email registration and credit card payment design minimizes user education costs. This is similar to WeChat Pay’s subversion of cash transactions through QR code scanning, making technology invisible behind the experience.
• Imbalance between content and finance : Most SocialFi projects rely too much on token speculation, while Clout dynamically links token value to creator content output by binding real social media influence. This “influence is an asset” narrative may lead to more hybrid models similar to Substack’s “subscription-based content + token incentives”.

If Clout can continue to attract top KOLs and improve ecological tools (such as data analysis panels and DeFi staking protocols), it is expected to become an "infrastructure-level" application in the SocialFi field. Just as Uniswap reshapes the DEX landscape through automated market makers, Clout may redefine the liquidity standards of social assets with a "personal token issuance protocol".

Conclusion: Clout’s future picture

When YouTube launched its first creator ad-sharing program in 2007, critics in Silicon Valley derided it as a "childish experiment in giving pocket money to amateurs." No one expected that this move would actually trigger a creator economy worth hundreds of billions of dollars—seventeen years later, the monthly income of leading YouTubers would be comparable to that of small businesses.

Clout's experiment is repeating this revolution in a more radical way: it attempts to upgrade YouTube's "advertising sharing button" to a "personal IPO button." Fitness bloggers no longer need to wait for the platform algorithm to hand out traffic. They can directly encapsulate the expectations of 100,000 fans into crowdfunding tokens; independent musicians do not need to have 70% of their income taken away by record companies, and the tokens brought by a popular video The increase may be worth the royalties from a platinum record.

The core contradiction of this experiment is actually a replica of the evolutionary history of the Internet: how to find a balance between openness and regulation, speculation and creation, short-term arbitrage and long-term value . The answer given by Clout is quite revealing - through "legal currency entrance to reduce friction, internal and external disk mechanisms to filter bubbles, and real social relationships to anchor value", it is trying to carve out an intensive experimental field in the Wild West of SocialFi.

Looking back at history, from PayPal unlocking online payments to TikTok reshaping content distribution, every technological equality is accompanied by the fission of the old order. Now, Clout is pointing the finger of fission at social media’s strongest fortress: the pricing power of the attention economy . If it can resist the entropy increase of short-term speculation and truly build a value flywheel of “influence-token-practical scenarios”, perhaps we will eventually witness——

The Web3 declaration, "You are the IPO", which was once regarded as a fantasy, is changing from the ravings of encryption geeks to a tangible reality on every mobile phone screen.