Original author: Eric, Foresight News
On the evening of August 3 Beijing Time, Isabel Gonzalez, co-founder of POAP, announced that POAP will officially shut down its services after more than five years of operation.
In fact, this farewell began as early as March this year, when POAP announced it would transition into maintenance mode starting March 16, preventing new issuers from creating badges via the platform’s API and ceasing active development, with only existing functions remaining operational. Months later, maintenance mode became a full shutdown. Already minted POAP badges remain on-chain, and users can still view them through their wallets and block explorers, but the platform itself, which held countless on-chain memories, will officially close.
The story of POAP began at the ETHDenver hackathon in February 2019, when founder Patricio Worthalter distributed the first batch of digital badges. Attendees claimed an ERC-721 token via a link provided on-site, serving as an on-chain proof of their presence. The concept evolved into a business in 2021, when the NFT market surged and POAP perfectly tapped into the growing trend of community engagement. From large-scale in-person conferences to online AMAs and Discord events, organizations began issuing their own POAPs. Collecting badges became a status game among crypto natives, with a wallet’s POAP collection serving as an on-chain resume.
Around this credential, a wide variety of use cases have emerged within the industry. Some events require holders of specific POAPs as entry criteria—without the corresponding badge, users cannot access the venue or private channels. Some projects include users who hold a particular event’s POAP on their airdrop whitelist to identify genuine participants rather than bounty hunters. In DAO governance, some have experimented with using POAPs to measure community contributions, granting higher voting weight to badge holders. At the height of its popularity, even brands outside the crypto space joined in, with Adidas, Porsche, Johnnie Walker, and Time Magazine all using POAPs for marketing campaigns.
In May 2021, BanklessDAO’s BANK token airdrop used previously issued Bankless POAP NFTs as one of the primary criteria; in January 2022, the MEV-resistant DEX Cow Swap included users holding CoW POAPs in its token airdrop.
In 2022, POAP secured a $10 million seed round led by Archetype, with participation from Sapphire Sport, Collab+Currency, Protocol Labs, and others. By mid-2023, over 6.7 million POAPs had been minted on the platform by more than 37,000 issuers.
Shortly after completing its funding, starting in the second half of 2022, NFT trading volumes and floor prices continued to decline. Although POAPs, as commemorative tokens, were never primarily driven by speculation, they too lost the fertile ground for community growth. POAP’s long-standing policy of offering free minting to all users was a powerful advantage during its growth phase but became a burden in the mature phase. In April 2023, the platform announced it would begin charging commercial customers, with Isabel Gonzalez openly stating this was necessary for the platform’s long-term sustainability.
However, the results show that this fee transition failed to turn the tide. In its March announcement, Gonzalez acknowledged that the platform had identified a clear niche market but never found a way to sustain itself within that market. Just one month before POAP decided to enter maintenance mode, Espresso—which had raised nearly $60 million in total funding—still included POAP users who participated in various Espresso online and offline events as recipients of its airdrop.
At the time, the team claimed they were shifting to build the underlying standards for open collectibles, but the decision to shut down the current service itself demonstrates just how low the ceiling is for this niche market.
POAP was not the only "NFT experiment" to collapse in the past two years. In March 2024, Starbucks shut down its Odyssey loyalty program, which had operated for less than a year and a half. The project, which issued Journey Stamp NFTs on Polygon, never progressed beyond its closed testing phase, and the first series priced at $100 failed to sell out. Participants voiced straightforward complaints: to collect badges, they had to watch 20-minute videos and take quizzes, when all they really wanted was a discounted coffee.
Meta discontinued support for NFT features on Instagram and Facebook as early as March 2023. Reddit’s Collectible Avatars were once regarded as the most successful enterprise NFT project, with over 33 million minted in total, but monthly secondary market trading volume dropped to around $100,000 in 2024, and the project lead departed in early 2025. In September of the same year, Reddit announced the termination of its Creator Program; the avatar store closed in November, and the built-in Vault wallet was fully removed before New Year’s Day 2026.
The issues with these projects are surprisingly similar. They were all launched at the peak of bull market sentiment, treating NFTs as an end goal rather than a tool, and using the concept of on-chain credentials to wrap up activities that could have been accomplished just as well without blockchain. Starbucks’ loyalty program could be fully implemented with traditional points, and Reddit’s avatar collection wouldn’t lose any user experience without NFTs. When market enthusiasm can no longer sustain operational costs, and symbolic value fails to translate into real cash flow, shutdown becomes merely a matter of time.
POAP’s exit is especially poignant because it was the least like a speculative venture among these projects. Its problem was never a bubble, but a ceiling. Digital commemorative badges represent a real but narrow demand—too small to sustain the future of a company that raised tens of millions in funding. The badges remain on-chain, but those who issued them have moved on—this is perhaps the most common outcome in the crypto industry over the past few years.