Written by Jake Antifaev, CEO of Thrust
Crypto has been trying to figure out social money for the last ten years. From personal tokens, early NFTs and memecoins of the 2017 era to creator coins and celebrity coins of 2025. An ongoing search for how to tokenize culture, celebrity, and attention.
Crypto historically heavily overindexes on tech, and the tech has evolved. It’s technically very easy for anyone to mint a coin. It also overindexes on financialization, and it is very easy to trade and the trading infrastructure, including liquidity pools and market makers, has developed. Speculation thrives.
Yet, how to make the coin credible and sustainable long-term - that remains unsolved. It is possible that there is a need for another class of market participants - the curators.
Think of how Kickstarter standardized crowdfunding, how Patreon and Substack made ongoing creator support direct. Art Blocks, one of the few examples in crypto, has introduced art curation to the wilderness of the NFT space circa 2021 and turned crypto art into a cultural movement.
Each of these created structure: formats, expectations, and signals that let creativity scale without collapsing into noise. That is what social money needs.
The recurring dream of social money
Since 2019, crypto’s social layer has repeated a familiar pattern. A new token form appears, promising to “democratize ownership.” Early adopters rush in, value spikes, communities form and then the structure collapses under its own hype.
But behind every boom and bust, there’s a real insight. Creator coins (BitClout, Rally, Roll) showed that people could be markets. NFTs proved that digital art and collectibles could have value because of the provenance and can attract liquidity. Memecoins, for all their chaos, demonstrated that narrative itself can be a form of coordination.
Each wave had to invent a new way to signal legitimacy. Each new wave is expressed in infrastructure and models:
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Early Creator coins experimented with pricing infrastructure, earlier experiments with bonding-curve (Roll, Rally), and more recently with vesting (Zora).
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NFTs created provenance infrastructure. Verifiable authenticity is crucial for art and collectibles, especially when it comes to digital. NFT space also experimented with royalties that allowed for some longevity in the space, but in the end, the speculation overpowered, and royalties were effectively eliminated.
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Memecoins summoned a new distribution infrastructure. They live on Twitter, Telegram and Twitch, proving that collective storytelling moves markets faster than any ad campaign.
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Celebrity Coins (including the political ones) became mass onboarding events.
There are many factors that contribute to crypto’s cyclical nature. And no asset can hold when the entire market goes down, which makes it risky for individuals to attach their personal brands to coins. And that is why what we need is a social layer that will serve as somewhat of an isolation layer, protecting the personal coins from the weathers of the market. The social layer has to bring in credibility, meaning, and trust - that can sustain a market through a downturn.
The problem of abundance and the new layer
When anyone can launch a token, everyone will. And the result is noise.
The UX is finally here. Anyone can mint and trade tokens from their phone. You don’t need to code anything, you don’t even need a wallet. What’s missing now is the social layer, the frameworks that help people understand what they’re joining and why it matters.
Open systems need interpretive layers - institutions of context. Because abundance without structure creates fatigue, and let’s be real the world is not joining Crypto Twitter.
What social money needs next isn’t another exchange or launchpad, it’s a curation layer.
This layer would:
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Vet both mechanics and projects.
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Encode the rules (clear vesting, contractual deliverables).
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Publish credible information about launches so fans and investors can make informed decisions.
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Act as a signal of trust.
In traditional media, publishers and labels made content discoverable and credible. In social money, publishers do the same for markets. They make the ecosystem readable to any participant, even if they are completely new (think of what Robinhood did for investing).
Social money will need the same standards for fairness, transparency, and deliverables.
There will be voices that will say that curation and standards are elements of centralization. But structure isn’t antithetical to openness. Structure is how an open system survives.
In closing
Crypto has always been about building open systems. But openness without structure collapses under its own weight. The next chapter of social money isn’t about minting faster or trading smarter; it’s about creating the structures that make those actions meaningful and help the market participants navigate safely. Curation isn’t control - it’s context. And context is what will turn speculation into participation, and crypto from an insider game into something the rest of the world can finally understand and join in.
About Jake Antifaev
Jake Antifaev is CEO and co-founder of Thrust, the platform turning celebrity fandom into social money and giving fans a real stake in success.
