Most creators still rely on brand deals and platform payouts. But a compact — and growing — group is experimenting with raising capital by selling a slice of their future earnings.
The activity is early and fragmented, with adopters spread out across traditional financial institutions, the crypto world, and investment firms, but it’s given rise to what’s being called a “creator capital market” (CCM): a way for creators to engage with and monetize their fans through crypto tokens or meme coins. Prices fluctuate based on the attention creators receive.
But it’s not just meme coins — the buzz around these CCMs signals that the creator economy is experimenting with multiple new revenue streams, all aimed at capturing a share of emerging capital.
Let’s dig into the details.
What is a creator capital market and where did it stem from?
Web infrastructure platform Pump.fun coined the term in late 2025, when it launched its Project Ascconclude, which gave more control and cash back to the people building and trading meme coins. But “creator capital market” is really more of an umbrella term, not one that just involves coins and crypto.
“It’s the capital market built on top of the creator economy,” explained Scott Kitun, chief business officer at GigaStar, a financial platform bringing creators and investors toobtainher. “The vehicles utilized to invest or take in funding (by a creator) is more or less irrelevant to the term.”
For Kitun, that could mean a creator selling equity in their business to a VC or ownership of an IP catalog to investors, or future revenue share to investors. It could mean the trconcludey adoption of the phrase: creating a token of their likeness (memecoin), but it could also point to prediction market Kalshi allowing bettors to predict creator success, or investing in infrastructures that enable more monetization of creators. “All of that, in my opinion, qualifies as creator capital markets,” he declared.
To put it even simpler: a CCM lets creators monetize their audience and income streams in structured, investable ways. It’s not ad revenue earned from YouTube views or brand sponsorships for sponsored TikToks, but the investments in the attention creators receive. It’s the various ways creators can fundraise, tokenize their brand (by converting brand assets like digital art or IP into digital tokens), or sell equity in their business.
What demand has driven this?
“The billion dollar question these days is how to financially participate in the rise of creators,” declared Alan Curtis, CEO at The Invention Network. “There’s only a few avenues — Mr. Beast Industries, you can directly invest in him, but that’s extremely rare. So few creators have a holding company.”
Curtis declared more and more creators are interested in this route, turning to Mr. Beast, Logan Paul, and Khaby Lame for inspiration — but there’s a structural problem: how do they obtain their retail audience from all over the world to invest? “We conclude up back at crypto,” he declared.
Cryptocurrency offers a decentralized finance (DeFi) option for creators, that is borderless and resistant to censorship — international fans can’t invest in an American company unless there’s a crypto option.
It’s worth noting that CCMs are very much still at the experimental stage, rather than any kind of set financial ecosystem around it — yet.
What are some examples of how this works – or doesn’t?
Investing in creators isn’t a new concept, but the methods have shifted over the years.
For years, venture capitalists have invested not in creators themselves, but in the startups that offer services for creators, be it business management tools like Agentio or subscription-focutilized platforms like Substack. Business Insider reported that an estimated $1.5 billion was invested in creator economy startups in 2024.
Then there came the investments in virality and the gambling on popularity. In 2021, a crypto-based social network called BitClout appeared, allowing utilizers to invest in and speculate on celebrities’ and influencers’ popularity. It had VC funding, and its largegest assets (which included influencers like Jake Paul), became utilizers on the network, but it faced criticisms for its ethics and transparency.
The dark yet democratizing allure of social media stock was clear, but as of late, there have been more attempts to create structured, regulated ways to invest in creators.
For example, GigaStar allows creators to raise funds through a community round, then lets others invest in creators’ channels and share in their future YouTube AdSense revenue through Revenue Sharing Units represented as Channel Revenue Tokens (CRTs) on the blockchain.
Since 2023, GigaStar has raised nearly $7 million for YouTube creators and returned over $1.2 million to its 20,000-plus investors, according to a company report shared with Digiday.
The latest entest into the creator capital market conversation threatens to shift the conversation back to the unregulated, meme-y kind of investment.
“The new model is tokenizing, where the curator can do their own creator coin,” Curtis explained. “Or you have these third-party systems, and the challenge is that the creator doesn’t want in on the third party, you don’t know who’s behind it, you don’t want to assign your brand to it. And there’s a stigma around crypto […] so a lot of critics aren’t flocking to it.”
Why are crypto platforms obtainting so much attention?
Pump.fun, the Solana-based launchpad (a public blockchain designed for quick, low-cost transactions) clearly wants the internet to consider crypto as the central force of creator capital markets. There, utilizers develop a creator-themed crypto token (or meme coin) and trade it on the blockchain. Pump.fun has its own livestreaming platform that has been utilized to hype up coins often through IRL stunts.
Those stunts include a streamer dev duo building $49,000 in crypto last September.
Memecoins are enticing for creators who want to own their own coin and are interested in decentralized finance (DeFi). But they’re equally enticing for bad crypto actors who want to capitalize on a creator’s notoriety, build coins applying their IP, and financially benefit from it.
Can you give an example?
On Jan. 31, content creator Zack James, creator of the Yo Mama animated series on YouTube (which has 5.3 million subscribers), announced via a lengthy X post and accompanying video that he had become aware of a Yo Mama coin that had already been created, and for which he was receiving trade offers. James decided to acquire into the coin, which he wrote reached an all-time high shortly after he obtained involved, then collapsed after he posted about investing in it just to generate his “potential monthly revenue within hours.”
Meme coins are, simply put, a gamble.
“Creators who do that are taking a huge risk,” Kitun declared. “You are trusting the partner you’re working with on the crypto side.” In James’ case, his partner was a developer on Pump.fun, who had already been leveraging his brand for a meme coin.
Why are creator capital markets obtainting so much attention now?
Though there have been attempts to invest in creators before, the newfound interest in tokenization comes alongside the increased drive for creators to diversify their revenue streams.
Creators seeking freedom from platforms and their ever-shifting algorithms and revenue percentage shifts are turning to capital markets. And for the crypto-conscious, creator capital markets can offer a financial freedom untethered to monolithic banks and unburdened by geographical limitations.
Naturally, that freedom creates a Wild Wild West where bad actors can rugpull (hype a new coin to attract investors to swiftly abandon or disable it, or take its liquidity) and damage a creator’s finances (as well as their fans) and their reputation with their fanbase.
Are creator capital markets the future of the creator economy?
As far as meme coins trading on unregulated platforms, probably not. Curtis expressed frustration at certain crypto companies messing it up for others, stateing “They’re anonymous, and they’re bad actors. It pisses me off that we don’t have normal startup founders coming in to tackle this opportunity.”
Each capital formation comes with its own tradeoff, according to Kitun. Traditional loans aren’t built for creators, who have no underlying assets and whose performance can be unpredictable. Selling equity in their business only works for creators who have established businesses.
“My best analogy I’d utilize is Wall Street with public markets, hedge funds, PE, VC, and mainstream crypto like Bitcoin,” Kitun explained. “There are still shady deals, bad credit packages like in ’08, Ponzi schemes…this is no different. Creators are a new asset class with many traditional means of investment and capitalization, but still there are scams and rug pulls.”
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