Here is a thing that is true and slightly annoying if you are a creator. You can have a million followers and own approximately none of them. They live on a platform. The platform knows who they are, what they click, when they show up. You get a dashboard, maybe, and a cut, maybe, and a polite reminder that the algorithm giveth and the algorithm taketh away. This is the arrangement, and most people have simply accepted it the way you accept weather.
P00LS - stylized with two zeros, because of course it is - does not accept it. Founded in 2021 by Hugo Renaudin and headquartered in Miami, the company is a Web3 protocol with a deceptively simple premise: let a creator issue their own cryptocurrency, hand it to the people who care most, and reward those people for the things they already do - holding an NFT, following on a niche platform, showing up. The token becomes a receipt for attention. And unlike a follower count, a token is something the creator actually controls.
You can be skeptical about this. A lot of people were, and are, and that skepticism is not unreasonable. Social tokens had a moment in 2021 that looked a great deal like a bubble, because it was one. But the underlying idea - that the relationship between a creator and their most devoted fans is valuable, measurable, and currently being harvested by someone other than the creator - is not a crypto idea. It is a business idea that crypto happens to be unusually good at expressing. That is the part of P00LS worth paying attention to.
The P00LS flow is straightforward enough to fit on a napkin, which is usually a good sign. A creator launches a token. They distribute it - often via airdrop - to their community. Fans then earn more of it by engaging, and the whole thing lives on-chain, where it can be tracked, rewarded, and traded on the P00LS decentralized exchange. The native $00 governance token sits at the center of the machine.
The clever part, and the part that separates P00LS from the more nakedly speculative corners of this world, is the emphasis on data over price. Early P00LS creator tokens were described as acting like "digital cookies" - a way for a creator to actually see their community rather than guess at it. That framing tells you something about the company's instincts. The pitch is not "get rich." The pitch is "finally know who your people are." Those are very different products, and only one of them survives a bear market.
Everyone in this business talks about "engagement." Almost nobody can define it in a way that survives contact with a spreadsheet. A like is not a purchase. A follow is not a friendship. The gap between "people who nominally follow you" and "people who would actually do something for you" is enormous, and it is precisely the gap where all the value hides.
P00LS's bet is that a token collapses that gap into something you can see. If someone holds your token, trades your token, earns your token by showing up - that is a signal with skin in it. On-chain supporter analytics turn a fuzzy feeling into a map. For a creator trying to decide who gets the early access, the concert tickets, the limited drop, that map is genuinely useful, crypto or no crypto.
The company leans hard into being multi-chain - Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism - not because multi-chain is a fashionable phrase but because fans do not care which blockchain they are on and creators should not have to. Meeting users where they already are is an unglamorous product decision. It is also usually the correct one.
None of this requires believing that creator tokens will moon, or that the price of $00 tells you anything meaningful about anything. It requires only believing that creators would like to own their relationship with their audience, and that they currently do not. That belief is doing all the work, and it is a reasonable belief to hold.
Anyone with an audience in web3 can automatically create their own loyalty points as a token and distribute them to their community.— P00LS, on the whole idea in one sentence
In April 2022, the two-time FIFA World Player of the Year launched $RON, a creator token built on P00LS, letting fans into "Ronaldinho's universe" - exclusive content, events, merch, token-gated channels, NFTs. It is a slightly surreal sentence to write, and that surreal quality is a feature, not a bug. When a Ballon d'Or winner issues a currency, the concept stops being abstract.
Ronaldinho is the headline, but the roster is broader and more interesting than a single celebrity. Since launching its first creator token in December 2021, P00LS has attracted names across sport, music, fashion, art and media:
The spread matters. A social-token platform that only lands crypto-natives is preaching to the converted. A platform that lands a football legend, a legacy magazine, and a French electronic label is testing whether the idea travels outside the bubble it was born in. So far it travels further than the skeptics assumed, which is the most you can honestly say and more than most projects can.
P00LS raised a total of roughly $18M, with a roster of investors that reads less like crypto tourists and more like people who fund consumer companies for a living: Acrew Capital, Maveron, Global Founders Capital, Kima Ventures and Red Sea Ventures, among others. That investor mix is a small tell. Maveron, for one, is known for backing consumer brands - the sort of firm that cares whether real people will use a thing, not just whether the tokenomics rhyme.
P00LS launches its first creator token.
Ronaldinho launches creator token $RON on the platform.
Creator Worlds and the P00LS decentralized exchange launch, reaching $20M+ combined market cap within 24 hours.
Total funding reaches ~$18M from Acrew, Maveron, Kima and others.
A note on the $20M-in-24-hours number, because these numbers deserve a raised eyebrow: a fast first day proves demand exists, not that it endures. The $00 token, like most of its 2022 cohort, saw enormous volatility after launch. That is the honest asterisk on any creator-crypto story from that era, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of hype. The durable question is not what happened on day one. It is whether the tooling - the mapping, the rewards, the ownership - keeps being useful after the charts get boring.
Mint a custom ERC20 that represents your brand and hand it to your community - no need to be a smart-contract engineer.
Holder insights and on-chain analytics map who actually shows up, so rewards go to the people who earn them.
Hold NFTs, follow, engage across platforms - and get rewarded for the loyalty you were already giving away for free.
Token-gated content, events, merch and NFTs open up to holders inside a creator's "Creator World."
Media and brand partners like TIME use tokens to turn passive readers into a mapped, rewardable community.
Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism - the protocol follows fans wherever they already transact.
P00LS is the work of co-founder and CEO Hugo Renaudin, running a small, distributed, crypto-native team of roughly 25 out of Miami. The company's public personality is unusually loose for a blockchain outfit - it named its community AMAs "Skinny Dipping," which, given the name P00LS, is either a groan or a grin depending on your tolerance for a pun. Either way it signals a company that would rather be liked than revered, which in a sector heavy on grandiosity counts as refreshing.
Your Token, Your Community.— The entire thesis, four words, on the front page
The competitive field is real - Rally and Roll walked this path first, Coinvise and Tribute Labs are nearby, and sports-fan-token platforms like Socios/Chiliz play in adjacent waters. Further out, plain old creator-monetization tools like Patreon solve a slice of the same problem without a blockchain in sight. P00LS's distinguishing bet is the combination: community-first design, on-chain analytics, and a roster that reaches beyond the crypto faithful. Whether that bet pays is not yet settled. But it is a coherent bet, made by people who seem to understand both what a token is and, more importantly, what a fan is. In this corner of the internet, that pairing is rarer than it should be.
Reporting compiled from public sources including p00ls.io, Crunchbase, PitchBook, Business Wire and press coverage of P00LS creator-token launches. Funding figures and market-cap milestones are as reported publicly and are approximate. Token prices are volatile and nothing here is investment advice.