Forward the Original Title: SocialFi’s New Species: How a 15-year-old Dropout Genius is Reinventing the Influencer Economy with Clout?

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 Deep Dig - Ben Pasternak is not an unknown person. This serial entrepreneur who dropped out of school at the age of 15 to develop popular social applications and was selected into Forbes 30 Under 30 at the age of 25 is trying to use Clout to inject cryptographic genes into the internet celebrity economy.

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?

At its core, Clout is a bold genetic recombination experiment in the SocialFi field—it cleverly stitches together FriendTech’s social asset logic with Pump.fun’s low-threshold coin issuance mechanism, ultimately incubating a “Nasdaq for influencers.”

Pattern breakdown:

• 1.FriendTech’s social fission gene

• Just like FriendTech converts Twitter fans into private domain traffic, Clout further “on-chain” influence: creators issue personal tokens by binding their

• 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 controls liquidity through internal and external disk mechanisms: internal pre-sales are gaining momentum (limited to intra-platform transactions), and after the external disk is opened, it will be connected to DEXs such as Raydium, forming 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 money 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 entrepreneur. At 15, he developed the game “Impossible Rush,” which surged into the Top 20 in the US App Store. At 17, he founded the teenage social platform Monkey, with over 20 million users. At 20, he pivoted to plant-based chicken nuggets, NUGGS, capturing Walmart’s shelves. Now, this entrepreneurial genius has ventured into the crypto space with Clout.

This seemingly erratic entrepreneurial trajectory conceals a hidden logic: the standardization of abstract value. Whether encapsulating teenage social needs into a video matching algorithm or reconfiguring soy protein into “cyber chicken nuggets,” Ben has always excelled at deconstructing complex systems and transforming them into scalable products. Clout is the standardized measuring device he has attached to “personal influence”—when a social media account is verified with 100,000 followers, the system automatically generates a token contract. This parallels the NUGGS factory molding plant protein into chicken nugget shapes, fundamentally sharing the same industrialized mindset.

The ultimate specimen of this kind of thinking is the token PASTERNAK named after him. As the first case 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 ambition clearly goes beyond this. In a recent AMA, he likened Clout to the “Wall Street + Hollywood of the Web3 era,” attempting to merge financial pricing with celebrity dream-making. However, history often repeats itself: in the 1990s, the sports card trading market collapsed due to over-speculation; in 2023, Friend.tech’s tokenized social graph experienced a boom and bust. When Clout equips every influencer with a mini money printing machine, perhaps a more pressing question should be asked: as traffic becomes a fixed asset on the balance sheet, will social media evolve into a more efficient value network or devolve into a finance reality show with audience participation?

Celebrity Tokenization Craze and Business Model Analysis

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-carrying capacity of traditional physical assets. 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 upgrades this encryption game into a national financial experiment through the double helix structure of legal currency entrance + enhanced liquidity.

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

The crypto 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 seem 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 to enter the market.
• Moonshot’s liquidity migration logic: It is worth mentioning that Ben is an investor in Moonshot. Moonshoot designed a “migration to DEX after market value reaches the standard” mechanism, and Clout improved it into a “dual-track internal and external market system” - pre-sales on the internal market to accumulate initial liquidity, PVP after the opening of the external market, and the expectation of listing on 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 the 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

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

When YouTube launched its first creator ad-sharing program in 2007, Silicon Valley critics dismissed it as a “childish experiment in giving pocket money to amateurs.” Yet this move sparked a creator economy worth hundreds of billions of dollars—seventeen years later, top YouTubers earn monthly incomes rivaling those of small businesses.

Clout’s experiment takes this revolution further: it transforms YouTube’s “advertising sharing button” into a “personal IPO button.” Fitness bloggers need not wait for platform algorithms to distribute traffic—they can directly convert their 100,000 fans’ expectations into crowdfunding tokens. Independent musicians no longer lose 70% of their income to record companies. A single viral video could generate token value equivalent to platinum record royalties.

This experiment mirrors the Internet’s core evolutionary challenge: balancing openness with regulation, speculation with creation, and short-term gains with long-term value. Clout’s solution is elegant—using fiat currency gateways to reduce friction, implementing internal and external market mechanisms to filter bubbles, and anchoring value through authentic social relationships. Through these innovations, it’s creating a controlled testing ground in SocialFi’s frontier.

Throughout history, from PayPal revolutionizing online payments to TikTok transforming content distribution, every technological breakthrough has disrupted established orders. Now, Clout challenges social media’s ultimate stronghold: the pricing power of the attention economy. If it can withstand short-term speculation pressures and build a sustainable cycle of influence, tokens, and practical applications, we may witness something remarkable—

The once-dismissed Web3 manifesto, “You are the IPO,” evolving from crypto enthusiasts’ vision into everyday reality on smartphones worldwide.

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