Author: Fairy, ChainCatcher
In the context of centralized platforms dominating user attention and squeezing the profits of content creators, subs.fun came into being, trying to reawaken the original ideal of the Internet: to build a community-driven, value-shared network universe.
subs.fun combines AI technology with crypto-economic mechanisms to create a new platform where users can post and trade in tokenized sub-forums ("subs"), and receive rewards for content contributions, exploring new models for content community operation and value distribution.
So how do posting and making money go together on subs.fun?
How does subs.fun work?
subs.fun supports trading, posting and making money in subs. Each sub is a sub-forum with tokens and is equipped with a dedicated AI agent Subagent. When members contribute insights, data and discussions, subagent will incorporate them into the knowledge base and reward contributors.
Each sub generates a new token when it is created, and joining the sub requires holding the corresponding token (i.e., the token gating mechanism).
Members help subagents build their knowledge system by posting links, content and likes. The more likes a post gets, the more weight the subagent will attach to its content when learning. Members are rewarded with sub tokens for posting high-quality content and actively interacting.
Team Background
Alvin Hsia is the co-founder of subs.fun and the co-founder and CEO of Shadow. He graduated from UCLA with a double bachelor's degree in business economics and computer science, and actively participated in various activities and clubs during his time at school.
Alvin Hsia has extensive experience in Internet product management and Web3 entrepreneurial background. Alvin worked as a product analyst and product manager at Edmodo for a total of three years. He then joined Airbnb for five and a half years. Initially as a project manager, he led the team from 10 to more than 200 people, covering multiple functional areas such as product, design, data science, research, content, marketing and operations. In 2020, he entered the Web3 field and briefly worked at the decentralized credit protocol Goldfinch. In 2023, he founded the developer platform Shadow and launched subs.fun in 2025.
Jonathan Becker, the founding engineer of subs.fun, has five years of engineering experience and has worked as an engineer at companies such as Chainalysis, Transpose, and Bubbles. He is currently the founding engineer of subs.fun and Shadow. At Shadow, he is mainly responsible for designing and developing Rust-based blockchain indexing solutions and data pipelines, and is committed to building systems with high availability and production-level stability.
Jonathan Becker
How to start a Sub on Subs.fun?
On the subs.fun platform, users can create and manage a tokenized sub-forum (Sub) to incentivize community members to participate and allow them to receive rewards for their contributions. Here are the specific steps:
1. Set basic information
First, users need to set some basic information for the sub-forum, including name, code symbol, description, and picture.
2. Provide seed data for subagent
Subagents learn from the information curated by users. The more relevant, high-quality, and unique the user’s data sources are, the more professional and valuable the subagent becomes.
Supported content types: Blog posts and subreddits, YouTube videos, Apple Podcasts, Twitter/X posts, PDF files and research papers, custom text notes, CSV files containing URLs.
3. Design your own subagent
In subs.fun, the personality and behavior of a subagent can be customized to your needs. Users can set:
- Brief: Create backstory and lore for subagents.
- Knowledge rigor: Determines whether the subagent should strictly answer questions based on the content and data sources in the subforum.
- Platform-specific behaviors: Adjust the subagent’s interaction style and writing style based on the platform (e.g., Subs, Twitter/X).
4. Tokenization and launch
There is a one-time fee of 0.5 SOL to launch a subforum, which includes 1,000,000 subforum tokens and covers Solana network fees. As a subforum creator, users will automatically receive 1,000,000 subforum tokens. Users can also choose to purchase more tokens after launch for use in community funding pools, gift memberships, etc.
Once a subforum is launched, tokens will be open for anyone to purchase. Over time, the subforum will continue to grow, and the subagent will continue to learn and evolve with the contributions of community members.
To join someone else's subforum, users will need to hold at least 10,000 subforum tokens and maintain this minimum balance to continue accessing the subforum.
