There's a line in Pons Asinorum's latest breakdown of Xeet that I keep coming back to:
"You can pay a man to speak. You cannot pay him to be believed."
That single sentence captures everything that went wrong with Web3 marketing over the last four years — and everything Xeet is attempting to fix. If you've spent any time in the crypto creator trenches, you already feel this in your bones. But let me lay it out anyway, because the implications here are bigger than one platform.
The Expensive Education Nobody Asked For
Let's be honest about what happened.
InfoFi platforms paid people to post about crypto projects. The thesis was elegant: reward influence, track attention, compensate accordingly. The result was a spam apocalypse. AI-generated slop clogged timelines. Engagement pods manufactured fake virality. Real creators — the ones actually building audiences and trust — got buried under an avalanche of volume players gaming every metric that existed.
SocialFi had a different pitch. Buy into a creator's orbit. The concept of on-chain community membership and identity tied to creators? Genuinely interesting. But the execution turned it into a memecoin derivative. Keys went up because people bought them. Keys went down because people sold them. The "utility" was access to a group chat that went silent after two weeks. Pumpfun essentially confirmed the thesis when it launched creator-tied streaming coins shortly after — speculation as the product, not speculation as the access layer to a product.
Then there were the Web3 agencies pushing KOL campaigns. Brands paid thousands — sometimes tens of thousands — for a couple of posts from accounts with inflated follower counts. The KOL posted, collected the bag, and never looked back. The brand got impressions. What they didn't get was users, deposits, or retention.
Millions upon millions of dollars evaporated. The lesson should have been obvious from the start: paying for engagement is not paying for outcomes.
Enter Pons Asinorum and Xeet
For those unfamiliar, Pons Asinorum (known as @Pons_ETH on X) has been building in Web3 since 2021. He's the mind behind The Plague NFT collection — a project that earned respect in the NFT community for its art direction and community-first approach during a time when most PFP projects were racing to rug. That background matters here because it tells you something about how Pons thinks about community: not as an extractable resource, but as the actual product.
Xeet launched with a declaratively simple thesis: be a results-first marketing platform. Pay for verified outcomes, not vanity metrics. And while Pons is transparent about the fact that Xeet itself contributed to the InfoFi noise problem early on, he's equally transparent that they were the first to course-correct — launching the Xeet Certified Creator (XCC) process back in December, before X changed its terms of service to crack down on pay-for-post mechanics.
When X pulled the rug on the entire InfoFi engagement model overnight, most platforms scrambled. Xeet pivoted faster because the pivot was already underway.
How Xeet Actually Works (The Squad System)
Here's where it gets genuinely interesting from a game theory perspective.
Creator Cards as Access Tickets, Not Speculation Tokens
Every creator on Xeet has a Creator Card. If you want to join that creator's squad for a tournament, you hold their card. No card, no squad. No squad, no participation.
This is critical: the card's value is tied to the creator's actual performance in tournaments, not vibes, not hype, not follower count. It's a ticket whose worth is determined by whether the squad leader can actually drive results.
One Squad, One Commitment
When a tournament goes live, you pick one squad. Not five. Not ten. One. You commit.
This creates two powerful dynamics:
1. Clean attribution. Brands can trace exactly which squad drove which outcomes. No ambiguity. No "well, mindshare went up so maybe it worked."
2. Strategic squad selection. Participants become selective. They evaluate the leader's track record, the squad's composition, the tournament's reward structure. It transforms participation from passive engagement farming into an active strategy game.
Squads Within Squads
Pons describes what he calls "squad inception" — Creator B can join Creator A's squad, meaning Creator B's entire squad wins if Creator A's squad wins. Winnings are proportional to each sub-squad's contribution. This creates layered coordination structures that mirror how real marketing operations actually function.
Verified Results, Not Verified Posts
This is the core differentiator, and it's worth understanding the verification stack:
- On-chain actions (trades, deposits, liquidity provision) → verified on-chain
- Platform signups → verified through API integration
- Extension-trackable actions → verified through the Xeet browser extension
- Content quality → verified through AI review or manual review
Brands define the KPIs. A typical tournament might include:
- Account creation and wallet connection
- Trading volume generated
- Funds deposited
- Advanced feature completion (LP provision, etc.)
- Repeat usage
- Referrals
- Educational content that actually teaches someone how to use the product
Each tier earns "Xeets" — the platform's contribution tracking unit. No proof of results? No reward. Botted metrics don't count because the verification layer is tied to real, attributable actions.
This changes the entire creator calculus. A creator with 2,000 genuinely engaged followers who can organize a team, produce tutorials, and drive actual on-chain actions will outperform a creator with 200,000 followers who posts a link and walks away.
If you're a mid-size creator who's been grinding and wondering when audience quality would matter more than audience quantity — Pons is essentially telling you this is that moment.
What a Winning Squad Actually Looks Like
A competitive squad isn't just a bunch of accounts posting. It's a coordinated marketing operation:
- On-chain users who actually use the product and drive core conversion metrics
- Educators who create tutorials, walkthroughs, and explainers
- Editors and clippers who turn raw content into polished, shareable pieces across platforms
- Community helpers who answer questions and onboard new members
- Referrers with activatable networks
- Whales who can become genuine power users if the product is good
This is basically a decentralized marketing agency model — except the agency is the creator's community, the results are verified on-chain, and the incentive alignment is baked into the structure rather than enforced by contracts nobody reads.
The Bigger Picture
What Xeet is actually building is a synthesis of everything that partially worked:
- From InfoFi: Democratized influence and distribution mechanics — but gated behind quality verification
- From SocialFi: Identity and access layers tied to creators — but not reliant on speculation alone
- From affiliate marketing: Outcome alignment — but enhanced with blockchain verification and community coordination
The short-term focus is Web3 teams building real products who need real users. The long-term vision — and Pons admits this sounds ambitious — is expanding beyond crypto entirely. Every brand, every vertical, connecting creators with loyal fans in a way that builds value for everyone.
Is that vision realistic? Maybe. Maybe not yet. But the model is sound, and the timing is right. Crypto is being forced through a Darwinist filter right now. The fugazi metas — the airdrop farming, the engagement mining, the speculation loops — are getting killed off not by regulation or ethics but by the simple fact that they stopped working.
My Take
I've watched every iteration of this cycle. The whitelist grind. The airdrop farms. The KOL pump-and-dumps. The InfoFi noise machines. Every single one optimized for the wrong metric.
Xeet isn't guaranteed to succeed. No platform is. But the framework is the most intellectually honest attempt at solving Web3's marketing problem that I've seen. It asks the right question: what if we only paid for things that actually worked?
The Plague community already showed that Pons understands how to build something people care about beyond speculation. If he can translate that same ethos into a marketing platform — one where the incentives actually align between brands, creators, and fans — then we might finally be looking at the exit from the fugazi marketing meta.
Signal over noise. Results over impressions. Common sense over copium.
About time.
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