Original | Odaily

Author | Golem

Regardless of the overall market environment, there are still thriving local hotspots in the blockchain industry. Today, the time tokenization platform time.fun on Solana has caught the attention of market players and has received explicit support from the Solana official. Earlier this morning, the Solana official account posted a tweet promoting time.fun, and mentioned that several members of the Solana Foundation have created their own time tokens.

At noon today, Solana co-founder toly also created his own token on time.fun, with a peak market value of $20 million, which has now fallen back to $6.7 million. He also posted some interesting comments on the X platform about time.fun.

Introduction to the time.fun platform: Time tokenization, an advanced version of friend.tech

time.fun was established in 2024 and is a platform that tokenizes time, similar to friend.tech, allowing KOLs or internet celebrities to tokenize their own time/influence and establish connections with their fans. However, the difference is that KOLs can price their private messages, group chats, voice/video calls, and users need to spend the corresponding token amount to redeem. If the KOL does not reply to private messages or call invitations within 5 days, the time tokens spent by the user will be refunded.

When users trade time tokens, transaction fees are generated, most of which will be automatically deposited into the token issuer's time.fun address. Meanwhile, when users redeem minutes to access the corresponding KOL services, these tokens will return to the liquidity pool, and the issuer will receive over 94% of the redemption value.

time.fun completed a $3 million seed round in August 2024, led by Brevan Howard Digital, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Breed VC, Zee Prime Capital, Arthur Hayes' family office Maelstrom, as well as angel investors including Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, and Helius co-founders Mert Mumtaz and Santiago Santos.

time.fun originally operated on the Base ecosystem, but migrated to Solana in November 2024. Regarding the reason, time.fun co-founder 0xKawz said that over the past year, Solana has been absolutely dominant in most aspects, while the Ethereum ecosystem has become fatiguing. In most cases, they only care about technology and have an arrogant attitude... Ethereum feels like a group of philosophers looking down on the common people. If Ethereum cannot solve its cultural problems, with more builders like time.fun choosing to migrate, Solana will continue to dominate.

Gameplay introduction: Still the core of pump.fun

The gameplay of the time.fun platform is actually quite simple, similar to pump.fun, with a distinction between the internal and external markets. Users' per-minute time prices are first traded on the internal market, and when the progress reaches 100%, they will be launched to the external market, and the liquidity will also be transferred from the AMM curve to Raydium. But unlike pump.fun, the maximum supply of tokens created on the time.fun platform is 100,000.

However, currently the creation of tokens on time.fun is not permissionless, as one needs to contact the team to create a token. Therefore, ordinary users can only participate in buying and selling other people's tokens on the platform, with the specific operations as follows:

Deposit to the time.fun platform

The time.fun platform requires email registration, and after registration, users can bind their X account. After successful registration, each account will automatically generate a non-custodial address. time.fun runs on the Solana network, but uses USDC for all transactions, so players need to transfer USDC to the generated address.

Click on the avatar in the top right corner and select "Deposit funds" to send USDC from an exchange or other chain address.

Trading on time.fun

Generally speaking, once someone's tokens are launched to the external market, they can be traded using regular trading tools like GMGN. Therefore, for already launched tokens, it is recommended to use other regular Solana trading tools to purchase, as the buying experience on the time.fun platform is not very good currently, and the author encountered several failed attempts when trying it personally. However, it is worth noting that even if the address only has USDC and no SOL for gas, the purchase can still be successful.

Click "Explore" at the top of the platform to see all the tradable tokens and their categories.

Randomly click on a token still in the internal market, as shown in the image, the current AMM progress is 47.53% and the price is $0.48 per minute. If a player wants to send a private message, they need to spend $20 worth of minutes. Players can choose the number of minutes they want to purchase on the right.

The comeback of celebrity tokens?

In summary, time.fun can be compared to a platform for issuing celebrity tokens with attached holder rights. From the rights provided by the platform, it is suitable for KOLs, paid knowledge communities, and entertainment anchors.

Celebrity tokens are not uncommon in blockchain history. The hugely popular friend.tech in 2023, which supported KOLs to sell their personal shares on the platform, was actually an early prototype of celebrity tokens. Originally designed as a private community for influential people to improve the quality of information received, it eventually evolved into pure consumption and price speculation of KOL influence, with almost no one caring about the platform's content building.

By the time of pump.fun, celebrity tokens were fully exposed, with entertainment stars, web2 entrepreneurs, political figures, and even the president of Argentina rushing to issue tokens on the chain to monetize their influence. Until the "savior" Argentine president issued LIBRA and reaped billions of dollars, the market finally performed the last exorcism on celebrity tokens, but at the cost of the meme market being severely depressed.

time.fun co-founder 0xKawz once stated that allowing celebrities to issue tokens randomly without any process, utility, or plan is short-sighted. Celebrity/social tokens are inevitable, but should be placed on a platform with income sources and practical applications. Celebrities don't need to buy/sell their own tokens to earn income, and they can provide structured products for fans, so that as users, they can both speculate on celebrity tokens for profits and use the tokens to gain exclusive access to them.

With the strong support of Solana, will time.fun be able to change the market's poor impression of celebrity tokens, take over the baton from pump.fun, and become the next flagship for Solana? We shall wait and see.