SocialFi New Species: How a 15-Year-Old Dropout Genius is Rebuilding the Influencer Economy with Clout?

Author: Luke, Mars Finance
The long-dormant SocialFi track is stirring again, with an application called Clout rewriting the rules of "influence monetization."

Today, this platform that allows users to issue personal tokens officially launched, and its first token $PASTERNAK skyrocketed to a market value of over $80 million within 5 hours, instantly becoming the focus of the crypto market. Digging deeper into the operator behind it—Ben Pasternak is no stranger; this 15-year-old dropout who developed a hit social app and was named in Forbes' 30 Under 30 at 25 is attempting to inject crypto genes into the influencer economy with Clout.

Notably, this experiment coincides with a golden window for the celebrity token craze. Starting with a series of tokens from the Trump family, social media influence is being quantified into tradable digital assets. What sets Clout apart is that it simplifies the complex token issuance process to the level of creating a social media account: binding social media verification, credit card payment support, and an automatic allocation mechanism for internal and external trading—this "Web2 influencer-friendly" design may be bringing a massive influx of fresh blood to the crypto industry.

What is Clout?

The essence of Clout is a bold genetic recombination experiment in the SocialFi field—it cleverly stitches together the social assetization logic of FriendTech and the low-threshold token issuance mechanism of Pump.fun, ultimately incubating a "celebrity version of Nasdaq."

Model Breakdown:

1. FriendTech's Social Fragmentation Gene

• Just as FriendTech converts Twitter followers into private traffic, Clout further "chains" influence: creators issue personal tokens by binding their X accounts (requiring ≥10,000 real followers), and fans can purchase tokens to gain a "financial relationship" with their idols.

1. Pump.fun's Liquidity Enhancement Technique

• Drawing on Pump.fun's extremely simple token issuance process, Clout allows creators to complete token creation within 5 minutes and controls liquidity through internal and external mechanisms: internal pre-sales build momentum (limited to platform transactions), and after external trading opens, it connects to DEXs like Raydium, forming a price discovery closed loop.

Operational Path:

• STEP 1: Create username → Bind X account → X tweet verification (viral marketing)
• STEP 2: Enter token name/symbol → Set total issuance
• STEP 3: System automatically reviews follower count → After approval, pay on-chain fees → Generate token
• STEP 4: Fans deposit via credit card/Apple Pay/crypto wallet to participate in internal pre-sale

This hybrid model retains the imagination of FriendTech's "social capital securitization" while dissolving the crypto threshold through Pump.fun-style technological inclusivity. While other platforms are still debating "which is more important, social or financial," Clout has already pushed the influencer economy into an industrialized mass production era with a standardized assembly line.

Who is the Founder?

Ben Pasternak is a 25-year-old Australian who developed the game "Impossible Rush" at 15, which surged into the Top 20 of the App Store in the U.S., founded the teenage social platform Monkey at 17 with over 20 million users, and pivoted at 20 to conquer Walmart shelves with plant-based chicken nuggets NUGGS. Now, this entrepreneurial genius is entering the crypto field with Clout.

This seemingly leapfrogging entrepreneurial trajectory actually conceals a hidden logical line: standardizing abstract value. Whether encapsulating teenage social needs into a video matching algorithm or reconstructing soy protein into "cyber chicken nuggets," Ben has always been deconstructing complex systems and transforming them into scalable products. Clout is precisely the standardized measuring instrument he has equipped for "personal influence"—when a social media account is certified with 100,000 followers, the system automatically generates a token contract, akin to how the NUGGS factory shapes plant protein into chicken nuggets, essentially sharing the same industrialized thinking.

The ultimate experimental product of this thinking is the token named after him, PASTERNAK. As the first case of Clout, it also received support and retweet from Solana's official account. The token's market value surpassed $80 million within 5 hours of launch, yet the white paper clearly states "founder holds 0." This deliberate separation of interest ties is like setting up a control group in a laboratory: when the founder is completely unbound from the token's value, is the market's frenzy a recognition of technological logic or blind worship of celebrity IP?

Ben's ambitions clearly extend beyond this. In a recent AMA, he compared Clout to "Wall Street + Hollywood in the Web3 era," attempting to merge financial pricing with star-making. However, history often repeats itself: in the 1990s, the trading market for sports cards collapsed due to excessive speculation; in 2023, the tokenized social graph of Friend.tech experienced wild fluctuations. When Clout equips every influencer with a mini money printer, perhaps the more pressing question is: when traffic becomes a fixed asset on the balance sheet, will social media evolve into a more efficient value network or degenerate into a financial reality show involving everyone?

Celebrity Token Craze and Business Model Analysis

When Trump's MAGA token reached a market value of $50 billion, surpassing the valuation of his technology media group (DJT), the crypto market was completely awakened—the capital mobilization power of celebrities has far exceeded the value-bearing capacity of traditional physical assets. The emergence of Clout seems to have turbocharged this "influence IPO" wave: it not only standardizes celebrity token issuance into an assembly line operation but also upgrades this crypto game into a nationwide financial experiment through a fiat entry + liquidity enhancement dual-spiral structure.

1. Timing: 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 creation myths of presidential families collectively validate an underlying logic: social media influence is programmable capital. Clout keenly captures this trend, lowering the token issuance threshold to the minimalist operation of "binding Twitter account + 10,000 followers," making it so convenient that traditional financial IPOs seem cumbersome.

2. Genetic Recombination: The Hybrid Evolution of FriendTech + Pump.fun + Moonshot

The business model of Clout is essentially a synthetic biology of three genetic strands:

• FriendTech's Social Capitalization: Inheriting its core of tokenizing fan relationships, Clout addresses the liquidity fragmentation issue through standardized tokens (rather than fragmented Keys). FriendTech's Keys can only be traded within a closed ecosystem, while Clout tokens automatically connect to DEXs like Raydium after completing internal pre-sales, forming an open market price discovery mechanism.
• Pump.fun's Industrialized Token Issuance: Absorbing its low-threshold feature of creating tokens in 5 minutes, but achieving compliance upgrades through "identity verification + fiat entry." While Pump.fun users are still troubled by SOL chain gas fees, Clout's credit card payment channel has attracted a large number of Web2 influencers.
• Moonshot's Liquidity Migration Logic: Notably, Ben is an investor in Moonshot, which designed the "migrate to DEX after reaching market cap" mechanism. Clout has improved this to a "dual-track system"—internal pre-sales accumulate initial liquidity, and after external trading opens, it continues PVP, with expectations of listing on CEX later, forming a liquidity ladder from closed to open, avoiding the fate of tokens crashing immediately after listing.

3. Advantages of the Business Model

Clout's revenue structure showcases differentiated competitive strength compared to traditional social platforms:

• For Creators: Earn revenue through on-chain fees and 1% transaction fees. Compared to FriendTech's reliance on a single Key transaction commission, Clout's diversified charging model (such as internal transaction fees and external liquidity sharing) is more adaptable to market fluctuations.
• For Investors: The fiat entry channel lowers the participation threshold, attracting Web2 users. This design is similar to how Alipay simplified payment processes 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 three major pain points in the industry:

• Liquidity Dilemma: Traditional SocialFi platforms (like Friend.tech) have lost users due to token liquidity fragmentation, while Clout constructs a complete trading link from pre-sale to secondary market through internal and external linkage and CEX integration.
• High User Threshold: Crypto-native platforms rely on wallet operations, while Clout's email registration and credit card payment design minimize user education costs. This is similar to how WeChat Pay disrupted cash transactions through QR codes, making technology invisible behind the experience.
• Imbalance Between Content and Finance: Most SocialFi projects overly rely on token speculation, while Clout dynamically associates token value with creator content output by binding real social media influence. This narrative of "influence as an asset" may give rise to more hybrid models like Substack's "subscription-based content + token incentives."

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

Conclusion: The Future Landscape of Clout

In 2007, when YouTube launched its first creator ad revenue sharing program, Silicon Valley critics mocked it as "a childish experiment giving pocket money to amateurs." No one anticipated that this move would unlock a creator economy worth hundreds of billions—seventeen years later, the monthly income of top YouTubers can rival that of small businesses.

Clout's experiment is replaying this transformation in a more aggressive manner: it attempts to upgrade YouTube's "ad revenue sharing button" to a "personal IPO button." Fitness influencers no longer need to wait for platform algorithms to grant them traffic; they can directly package the expectations of 100,000 followers into crowdfunding tokens; independent musicians need not have 70% of their earnings taken by record companies; the token appreciation from a viral video may equate to the royalties of a platinum record.

The core contradiction of this experiment is essentially a replication of the history of internet evolution: how to find a balance between openness and regulation, speculation and creation, short-term arbitrage and long-term value. Clout's answer is quite enlightening—by "reducing friction through fiat entry, filtering bubbles through internal and external mechanisms, and anchoring value through real social relationships," it attempts to carve out a meticulously cultivated experimental field in the wild west of SocialFi.

Looking back at history, from PayPal unlocking online payments to TikTok reshaping content distribution, every technological empowerment has been accompanied by the fracture of the old order. Now, Clout is directing the fracture toward the most solid fortress of social media: the pricing power of the attention economy. If it can withstand the entropy of short-term speculation and truly build a value flywheel of "influence-token-practical scenarios," we may ultimately witness—

The once deemed delusional Web3 declaration, "You are the IPO," transforming from the murmurs of crypto geeks into a tangible reality on every smartphone screen.