Hugo
Renaudin

Money is not the only currency

Open the P00LS pitch and you will not find the usual crypto noise about getting rich. You will find a sentence that reads more like a manifesto than a business plan: money is not the only currency. Attention is. Loyalty is. The hour your favorite artist spent answering DMs is. Hugo Renaudin built a company to put those things on a ledger.

Today Renaudin is co-founder and CEO of P00LS, a Web3 platform that lets creators and brands mint their own tokens - small units of belonging that reward the fans who showed up first and stayed longest. The tokens are deliberately boring as speculation goes: non-transferable by design, so the day traders stay home and the actual community gets the upside. A like becomes a record. A follow becomes a position. The superfan who never missed a drop finally has something to show for it.

P00LS sits at the awkward, fertile intersection of three industries that usually talk past each other: social media, the creator economy, and blockchain. Renaudin's bet is that the missing layer in all of it is ownership. Platforms own the audience. Algorithms own the reach. Fans own a screenshot. P00LS hands the relationship back to the two parties who actually built it - the creator and the crowd - and writes it on-chain so nobody can quietly delete it later.

The math kid who read Bitcoin early

Before the tokens and the term sheets, there was a problem set. Renaudin trained as a mathematician at École Polytechnique, France's famously selective engineering school, studying applied math and economics. He then crossed the Atlantic for a master's in operations research at Columbia University. Operations research is the unglamorous science of making complicated systems run better - exactly the kind of brain that looks at a chaotic new market and sees structure where everyone else sees a casino.

He saw Bitcoin in 2013. Not bought-the-dip-saw-it - studied-the-whitepaper-saw-it, while most of the world still thought crypto was a punchline. For four years he watched. By September 2017 he could feel the room filling up: the community was growing, the energy was electric, and a math student in New York decided he was done watching from the bleachers.

LGO: transparency as a product

His first company, LGO, was founded in 2017 with a contrarian premise for the era: build a crypto exchange that institutions could actually trust. Provably fair. Transparent. Regulated on both sides of the Atlantic. While the rest of the industry treated compliance as a tax, Renaudin treated it as the feature. LGO grew to serve around 80 institutional clients across 20 countries, moving billions in volume.

It was also the vehicle for the line that follows him through every podcast intro: LGO ran what is described as the largest ICO in France, raising roughly $20 million in under ten hours. Renaudin was in his mid-twenties, managing people two and three decades older than him, and learning in real time that respect is not granted by a title - you earn it by giving it first. In October 2020, LGO was acquired by Voyager Digital. First company, real exit, before most people his age had finished onboarding at their second job.

A bank without bankers

Renaudin did not pause to enjoy the exit. He co-founded Bender Labs in late 2020 with Fred, whom he had met in New York during his Columbia years. The pitch was gloriously blunt: a bank without bankers. A self-driving financial institution where storing, trading, lending and borrowing happen through open-source smart contracts - no large account required, no relationship manager to charm. All you need is a wallet and an internet connection. It was the same conviction that pulled him into Bitcoin in the first place, scaled up: disintermediation, automation, fair access to money.

P00LS, and the receipts of fandom

In 2021 Renaudin launched P00LS, and the throughline from LGO and Bender Labs is hard to miss. Each company is an answer to the same question: who really owns the value here, and how do we hand it back to them? At LGO it was traders who deserved a fair market. At Bender Labs it was anyone shut out of banking. At P00LS it is the fan - the unpaid, unthanked engine of every creator's career.

The design choices give away the philosophy. Making the tokens non-transferable is not a technical accident; it is a values statement. Renaudin has been explicit that the point is to serve creators without the fear of speculation, so artists can understand and engage their audiences instead of watching a token become a slot machine. The reward goes to the supporter who tracked the journey, not the stranger who bought in at the top. It is the creator economy with the speculation surgically removed and the loyalty turned into a balance.

P00LS has raised roughly $18 million to chase that idea, and the company spans the full Web3 toolkit a modern creator might want: multi-chain support across networks like Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum and Tezos, NFT distribution, airdrops, wallet integration, and on-chain analytics that finally tell a creator who their real community is - not who the algorithm decided to show this week.

Manifest your own serendipity

For all the math and the smart contracts, the most Renaudin-ish idea is a soft one: manifest your own serendipity. It is the kind of phrase that sounds like a fridge magnet until you remember it came from someone who raised millions in an hour and earned the trust of people twice his age. Luck, in his telling, is not something that happens to you. It is something you stand in the path of on purpose - by showing up early, by giving respect before you ask for it, by reading the whitepaper four years before the crowd arrives.

Three companies in, still well-positioned in New York, still carrying a double-tornado emoji on his Twitter handle like a weather warning, Hugo Renaudin keeps building the same thing in different clothes: an internet where value flows to the people who actually create it. The artists. The traders. The fans. The crazy ones who showed up first.