Author: Fairy,

Edit: TB,

Against the backdrop of centralized platforms leading user attention and compressing content creators' benefits, subs.fun came into being, trying to reawaken the original ideal of the Internet: to build a community-driven, value-sharing network universe.

subs.fun integrates AI technology and crypto-economic mechanisms to create a new platform where users can post and trade in tokenized subforums (“subs”), and receive rewards through content contributions, exploring new models of content community operation and value distribution.

So, on subs.fun, how do posting and making money come together?

How does subs.fun work?

subs.fun supports trading, posting and making money in subs. Each sub is a sub-forum with tokens and comes with an exclusive AI proxy Subagent. When members contribute insights, data, and discussions, subagent incorporates them into the knowledge base and rewards contributors.

Each sub will generate a new token when it is created. To join the sub, you need to hold the corresponding token (i.e. token gating mechanism).

Members help subagent build a knowledge system by posting links, content and likes. The more likes a post receives, the more weight the subagent will have on its content when learning. Members receive sub token rewards for posting quality content and active interactions.

Team background

Alvin Hsia is the co-founder of subs.fun and serves as 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 societies during his time at school.

Alvin Hsia has rich experience in Internet product management and Web3 entrepreneurial background. Alvin has 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. He initially served as a project manager and led the team to expand from 10 people 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 space and briefly served on Goldfinch, the decentralized credit protocol. In 2023, he founded the developer platform Shadow and launched subs.fun in 2025.

Jonathan Becker, founding engineer at subs.fun, has five years of engineer experience and has worked in engineer positions at companies such as Chainalysis, Transpose and Bubbles. He is now a founding engineer at 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 creating systems with high availability and production-level stability.

Jonathan Becker

How to start a Sub in Subs.fun?

On the subs.fun platform, users can inspire community members to participate and get rewards from their contributions by creating and managing a tokenized subforum (Sub). The following are the specific steps:

1. Set basic information

First, the user needs to set some basic information for the subforum, including name, code symbol, description, and pictures.

2. Provide seed data for subagent

subagent learns from user-planned information. The more relevant, higher the quality and unique the user's data source, 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 subagent can be customized to your needs. Users can set:

• Introduction: Create backstory and legend for subagent.
• Knowledge Strictness: Determines whether subagents should answer questions strictly based on the content and data sources in the subforum.
• Platform-specific behavior: Adjust the interaction and writing style of subagents according to different platforms (such as Subs, Twitter/X).

4. Tokenize and start

Launching a subforum requires a one-time fee of 0.5 SOL, 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 startup for purposes such as community fund pools, membership gifts, etc.

Once the sub-forum is launched, the tokens will be open for anyone to purchase. Over time, the subforum will continue to grow and subagents will continue to learn and evolve as the contributions of community members.

To join someone else's subforum, users need to hold at least 10,000 subforum tokens and maintain this minimum balance to continue accessing the subforum.

(This article only introduces early projects and is not used as investment advice.)