Author: Fairy, ChainCatcher
In the context of centralized platforms dominating user attention and compressing content creators' earnings, subs.fun has emerged, attempting to revive the original ideal of the internet: building a community-driven, value-sharing network universe.
subs.fun combines AI technology with crypto-economic mechanisms, creating a new platform where users can post, trade, and earn rewards in tokenized sub-forums ("subs"), exploring new models of content community operation and value distribution.
So, how are posting and earning combined on subs.fun?
How does subs.fun operate?
subs.fun supports trading, posting, and earning in subs. Each sub is a sub-forum with a token and a dedicated AI agent called Subagent. When members contribute insights, data, and discussions, the subagent incorporates them into its knowledge base and rewards contributors.
Each sub generates a new token upon creation, and joining requires holding the corresponding token (token-gated mechanism).
Members help the subagent build its knowledge system by posting links, content, and likes. The more likes a post receives, the higher its content weight when the subagent learns. Members earn sub tokens for publishing quality content and active interaction.
Team Background
Alvin Hsia is the co-founder of subs.fun and also co-founder and CEO of Shadow. He graduated from UCLA with a dual bachelor's degree in Business Economics and Computer Science, actively participating in various activities and clubs during his studies.
Alvin Hsia has extensive experience in internet product management and Web3 entrepreneurship. He worked at Edmodo as a product analyst and product manager for three years, then joined Airbnb for five and a half years, initially as a project manager, expanding the team from 10 to over 200 people across multiple functions. In 2020, he entered the Web3 field, briefly working at the decentralized credit protocol Goldfinch. In 2023, he founded the developer platform Shadow and launched subs.fun in 2025.
subs.fun founding engineer Jonathan Becker has five years of engineering experience, previously working as an engineer at Chainalysis, Transpose, and Bubbles. He is currently the founding engineer at subs.fun and Shadow. At Shadow, he primarily designs and develops Rust-based blockchain indexing solutions and data pipelines, focusing on creating highly available and production-grade stable systems.
Jonathan Becker
How to Launch a Sub on Subs.fun?
On the subs.fun platform, users can create and manage a tokenized sub-forum (Sub) to incentivize community member participation and reward 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 image.
2. Provide Seed Data for the Subagent
The subagent will learn from the user's curated information. The more relevant, high-quality, and unique the data sources, 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 with URLs.
3. Design Your Subagent
In subs.fun, the subagent's personality and behavior can be customized according to your needs. Users can set:
Profile: Create a background story and legend for the subagent.
Knowledge Strictness: Decide whether the subagent should strictly rely on the sub-forum's content and data sources when answering questions.
Platform-Specific Behavior: Adjust the subagent's interaction and writing style based on different platforms (such as Subs, Twitter/X).
4. Tokenize and Launch
Launching a sub-forum requires a one-time fee of 0.5 SOL, which includes 1,000,000 sub-forum tokens and covers Solana network fees. As the sub-forum creator, the user automatically receives 1,000,000 sub-forum tokens. Users can also choose to buy more tokens after launch for community fund pools, member gifts, etc.
Once the sub-forum is launched, tokens will be open for anyone to purchase. Over time, the sub-forum will develop, and the subagent will continuously learn and evolve with community members' contributions.
To join someone else's sub-forum, users must hold at least 10,000 sub-forum tokens and maintain this minimum balance to continue accessing the sub-forum.
