Original author: Eric, Foresight News
On the evening of August 3, Beijing time, POAP co-founder Isabel Gonzalez announced that after more than five years of operation, POAP will officially shut down its services.
In fact, this farewell began as early as March of this year when POAP announced it would enter maintenance mode starting March 16. New issuers could no longer create new badges through the platform's interface, and existing functions were only maintained without active development. Months later, maintenance mode turned into a permanent closure. The already minted POAP badges will remain on the chain, and users can still view them via wallets and block explorers, but the platform itself, which carried the on-chain memories of countless people, will officially come to an end.
The story of POAP began at the ETHDenver hackathon in February 2019. Back then, founder Patricio Worthalter distributed the first batch of digital badges to attendees, who could claim an ERC-721 token via links distributed on-site as proof of their attendance on the chain. This idea became a "business" in 2021. That year, the NFT market heated up completely, and POAP happened to ride the wave of community operations. Offline conferences, online AMAs, and Discord community events, both large and small, began issuing their own POAPs. Collecting badges became an identity game for crypto-natives for a time, with one's POAP list in their wallet serving as an on-chain resume.
Around this resume, a plethora of use cases emerged within the industry. Some events made holding specific POAPs an entry requirement—without the corresponding badge, one couldn't enter the venue or private channels. Some project teams included users holding a particular event's POAP on their airdrop whitelists to filter for genuine participants rather than airdrop hunters. In DAO governance, some attempted to use POAPs to measure community contributions, giving badge holders greater voting weight. At the peak of its popularity, even brands outside the crypto circle participated. Adidas, Porsche, Johnnie Walker, and Time Magazine all used POAPs for marketing campaigns.
In May 2021, BanklessDAO's BANK token airdrop listed the POAP NFTs previously issued by Bankless as one of its main criteria. In January 2022, the anti-MEV DEX Cow Swap included users holding CoW POAPs in its token airdrop list.
In 2022, POAP raised $10 million in a 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 by more than 37,000 issuers on the platform.
Not long after completing the fundraising, starting in the second half of 2022, NFT trading volume and floor prices began a sustained decline. While POAPs existed as commemorative credentials rather than speculative assets, they similarly lost the soil for community expansion. POAP had long offered free minting to all users, which was an advantage during the growth phase but became a burden during the contraction phase. In April 2023, the platform announced it would start charging commercial clients, with Isabel Gonzalez stating frankly that this was for the platform's long-term sustainability.
However, judging by the outcome, this shift to a paid model failed to turn the tide. In the March announcement, Gonzalez acknowledged that the platform had found a clear niche market but ultimately failed to find a viable way to survive within it. And just one month before POAP decided to enter maintenance mode, Espresso, with total funding nearing $60 million, included users who had obtained POAPs at various Espresso online and offline events in its airdrop recipients.
At the time, the team mentioned pivoting towards building an underlying standard for open collectibles, but the decision to shut down the current service itself speaks volumes about how low the ceiling of this niche market is.
POAP is not the only "NFT experiment" to fall in recent years. In March 2024, Starbucks shut down its Odyssey membership program, which had run for less than a year and a half. This project, which issued Journey Stamp NFTs on Polygon, remained in closed beta from start to finish. Its first series, priced at $100, didn't even sell out. Participant complaints were blunt: they had to watch a 20-minute video and take a quiz to collect the badges, while all they wanted was a cheaper cup of coffee.
Meta was earlier, ending support for NFT features on Instagram and Facebook in March 2023. Reddit's Collectible Avatars were once seen as the most successful case of NFTs from a major company, with over 33 million cumulative mints. However, by 2024, monthly secondary market trading volume had fallen to around one hundred thousand dollars, and the project lead left in early 2025. In September of the same year, Reddit announced the termination of its creator program, closed the avatar store in November, and completely removed the built-in Vault wallet before New Year's Day 2026.
The issues with these projects are strikingly similar. They were all launched when market sentiment was at its peak, treating NFTs as an end goal rather than a tool, using the concept of on-chain credentials to package things that could have been done without blockchain. Starbucks' loyalty program could easily be implemented with traditional points; Reddit's avatar collection wouldn't lose much user experience without NFTs. When market hype could no longer support operating costs, and when symbolic value couldn't be converted into real cash flow, shutdown was only a matter of time.
POAP's departure is particularly poignant because it was the least speculative of these projects. Its problem was never a bubble, but a ceiling. Digital commemorative badges represent a real but extremely niche demand, too small to support the future of a company that had raised millions in funding. The on-chain badges remain, but the people who issued them have left the stage. This is perhaps one of the most common outcomes in the crypto industry in recent years.
