The trough has skyrocketed 100 times! Can the resurgent PASTERNAK lead the SocialFi craze?

Written by: Luke, Mars Finance

At the beginning of 2025, Clout crossed the sky of SocialFi like a dazzling meteor, and its first token, $CASTERNAK, soared to $80 million in market capitalization within five hours of its launch, igniting a frenzy in the crypto market. However, the success was short-lived, $PASTERNAK's market value plummeted to $190,000, and Clout was labelled a "soft rug pull" and faded away. Just when people thought the experiment was a thing of the past, in April 2025, Clout made a strong comeback under a new identity, Believe (@believeapp), $PASTERNAK market cap recovered to $20 million, and new tokens such as $DUPE and $SUPERFRIEND took off a craze. This is not only a rebranding, but also a rekindling of the SocialFi track.

Act One: The Fleeting Glory of Clout

The Crypto Adventure of the Genius Boy

Clout's founder Ben Pasternak is no stranger to the entrepreneurial scene. This 25-year-old Australian entrepreneur made headlines at 15 with his game "Impossible Rush," which reached the top 20 on the US App Store. At 17, he founded the social platform Monkey, which amassed 20 million users, and by 20, he broke into Walmart with his plant-based chicken nuggets, NUGGS. His entrepreneurial journey has consistently revolved around one proposition: to standardize and scale abstract value. Clout is his ambitious project to push this logic into Web3—transforming the influence of social media into tradable digital assets.

In January 2025, Clout debuted as the "Internet celebrity version of Nasdaq", integrating FriendTech's social capitalization and Pump.fun's low-threshold coin issuance mechanism. Creators only need to bind X account with more than 10,000 followers, enter the token name, and pay a small on-chain fee to issue personal tokens within five minutes. Fans participate in the pre-sale through credit cards, Apple Pay, or crypto wallets, and tokens can be traded on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) such as Raydium after entering the external market. This "Web2-friendly" design has allowed Clout to quickly become the focus of the celebrity token craze.

$PASTERNAK's Rocket and Fall

$PASTERNAK, as the first token of Clout, is named after Ben Pasternak and carries symbolic significance for the platform. The official retweet from Solana added to its allure, with a market capitalization surpassing $80 million and a trading volume of $181 million within five hours of its launch. The statement in the white paper claiming "zero holdings by the founders" has sparked heated discussions, with some praising its fairness while others questioning its marketing gimmick.

However, the glory of $PASTERNAK was as short-lived as fireworks. A few weeks later, its market value plummeted from $80 million to $190,000, a drop of 99.75%. Criticism on platform X was relentless, with investors accusing Clout of lacking transparency, and the tokenomics of $PASTERNAK being considered overly speculative and lacking practical use cases. Some users even referred to it as a "soft rug pull", believing the team failed to deliver on promises, leading to a collapse of trust within the community. Clout's internal and external trading mechanism (internal pre-sale accumulation, external access to DEX) attracted funds initially, but after the external market opened, there was insufficient buying pressure, causing the price to collapse rapidly. By mid-2025, Clout's activity had plummeted, with X account updates stagnating, seemingly exiting the historical stage.

Act Two: Lessons and Reflections on Failure

Pain points of SocialFi

The fall of Clout is not an isolated case. In 2023, FriendTech fell into a trough due to liquidity fragmentation and user loss; some meme coins from Pump.fun rapidly went to zero due to a lack of long-term value. The failure of Clout exposed three major pain points of SocialFi:

Speculation-driven: Token prices rely on market sentiment, lacking support from practical use cases.

Trust Crisis: Opaque governance and unclear roadmaps can easily trigger community dissatisfaction.

Liquidity crisis: The internal and external market mechanisms have failed to effectively balance supply and demand, leading to a price collapse.

Ben Pasternak once compared Clout to "Wall Street + Hollywood of Web3," attempting to merge financial pricing with star power. However, the complexity of financialized social interaction far exceeds expectations. When influence is encapsulated into tokens, short-term frenzy may lead to explosive growth, but it also sows the seeds for potential long-term collapse.

The transition from Clout to Believe

The failure of Clout is not the end, but the starting point for Ben Pasternak to reassess SocialFi. In April 2025, Clout is reborn as Believe. The new name not only symbolizes the reconstruction of trust within the community, but also conveys a belief in long-termism. Believe retains Clout's core mechanism—issuing personal tokens through X authentication—but undergoes a comprehensive upgrade in technology, ecology, and branding, attempting to solve the dilemma of SocialFi.

Act Three: The Revival of Believe and the Rebirth of $PASTERNAK

The return of Believe can be described as dramatic. $PASTERNAK rebounded from a low of $190,000 to $5.8 million, an increase of over 30 times. The total market capitalization of the new tokens $DUPE and $SUPERFRIEND on the platform has exceeded $10 million, and the App Store ranking is approaching the top 100, with discussions on X platform heating up. As Believe's platform token, $PASTERNAK has once again become the core of the ecosystem, carrying the community's expectations.

Strategic Upgrade of Believe

Technological Innovation:

Introducing Meteora's Dynamic Bonding Curve Program, which reduces volatility and enhances market stability by dynamically adjusting prices and liquidity pools.

Deeply collaborate with Raydium and Meteora to ensure a smooth transition of tokens from the internal market to the external market, addressing the external market crash issue during the Clout period.

Token use cases are clear:

$PASTERNAK is positioned as a platform token, which may be used for paying fees, incentivizing token creation, or participating in governance (specific details to be disclosed by the official sources).

Low-cost token creation (approximately 0.01 SOL) attracts more KOLs to join, expanding the ecosystem scale.

Community Empowerment:

Believe uses the viral spread of platform X to encourage users to promote tokens through posting, similar to the meme coin strategy of Pump.fun.

Launch the "Token Ranking" and "Hot Creators" features to enhance user engagement and incentivize content production.

Brand Rebranding:

The renaming from Clout to Believe aims to shake off the shadow of a "soft rug pull" and convey the concept of community co-creation.

A concise multilingual UI and email registration lower the threshold for Web2 users, attracting a wider audience.

The Boost of the New Token

The revival of Believe is inseparable from the success of the new tokens. $DUPE attracts attention with its humorous meme attributes, and its market value once exceeded 6 million dollars; $SUPERFRIEND rapidly accumulated fans through KOL collaborations. The craze for these tokens proves that Believe has learned from the lessons of Clout and found a more sustainable market strategy.

Act Four: The Clash between Believe and subs.fun

subs.fun: A Web3 Experiment in Knowledge Economy

In the SocialFi space, subs.fun has emerged with the positioning of a "tokenized knowledge forum." Founders Alvin Hsia and Jonathan Becker, leveraging their experience at companies like Airbnb and Chainalysis, have created a platform that integrates AI and crypto economics, aiming to reshape community value distribution. The vision of subs.fun is to build a decentralized "Reddit+Substack," incentivizing users to contribute content through "posting is mining."

the mechanism of subs.fun

Subforum (Sub): Each Sub is a tokenized community, and users must hold 10,000 Sub tokens to join. Tokens are earned through interactions such as posting and liking.

AI Subagent: The Sub is equipped with an AI agent that learns from user content and generates a knowledge base. High-quality posts receive more token rewards, and AI behavior can be customized.

Creation process: Pay 0.5 SOL to create a Sub, and receive 1 million tokens for incentives or liquidity pool. Supports multiple data sources (such as X posts, YouTube videos).

Believe vs. subs.fun: A Collision of Two Visions

Core Concept:

Believe: Focus on the financialization of personal influence, KOLs quickly monetize through tokenized fan economies, $PASTERNAK connects the ecosystem.

subs.fun: Emphasizes community collaboration and knowledge sharing, with AI-driven content incentives to build a decentralized knowledge network.

User Experience:

Believe: Aimed at Web2 users, the token creation and trading process is extremely simplified, suitable for creators and speculators seeking short-term returns.

subs.fun: Targeting Web3 users, with a 0.5 SOL fee for Sub creation and token gating adding complexity, suitable for long-term content builders.

Token Economy:

Believe: The single platform token model of $PASTERNAK is easy to integrate, but its value depends on platform activity and market sentiment. The historical volatility (from 80 million to 190,000) highlights the risk.

subs.fun: Each Sub has its own independent token, rewards are tied to content quality, diversifying risk, but the token value may become fragmented.

Growth Path:

Believe: Achieve explosive growth through KOL and meme coin culture, with strong short-term traffic, but be wary of speculative bubbles.

subs.fun: Growth is more stable, relying on content accumulation and AI optimization. The short-term popularity is limited, but the long-term resilience is stronger.

Risks and Challenges:

Believe: The shadow of "soft rug pull" and the volatility of $PASTERNAK may affect trust, requiring transparent governance and clear use cases.

subs.fun: The AI reward mechanism has not been widely validated, and the liquidity of the Sub token is limited by the size of the community, requiring more user adoption.

Believe and subs.fun represent two paths of SocialFi: one bets on the explosive power of celebrity capital, while the other explores a community-driven knowledge economy. Believe's rapid iteration and market sensitivity make it more attractive in the short term, but subs.fun's decentralized vision may have more impact in the long term. Both validate a trend: the attention economy is evolving into programmable capital.

Epilogue: The Future of $PASTERNAK and the Stars and Sea of SocialFi

The resurgence of Believe is a reflection of the resilience of SocialFi. From Clout's peak of $80 million to a low of $190,000, and then to the $5.8 million comeback of $PASTERNAK, Ben Pasternak has demonstrated through action that failure is merely a temporary trial. However, whether $PASTERNAK can lead the SocialFi wave depends on whether Believe can break through the speculation trap and give the token lasting value.

A transparent token economy, a stable liquidity mechanism, and the continuous trust of the community are the thresholds that Believe must overcome. At the same time, the rise of subs.fun reminds us that the boundaries of SocialFi extend far beyond celebrity tokens. It can be an incubator of knowledge, a connector of communities, and even a new starting point for the democratization of the internet.

When influence becomes an asset, every like and retweet could be a micro IPO. Believe's vision of "personal IPO" and subs.fun's experiment of "posting is mining" together outline the future landscape of Web3. Can $PASTERNAK reignite the SocialFi craze? The answer may lie in the next wave of trending posts and the next token frenzy. And we are all witnesses and participants in this transformation.