What Ansem is actually doing

On the evening of July 5, Ansem posted the sentence that I think is the closest thing $ANSEM has to a whitepaper:

nobody has figured out how to turn attention into a persistent revenue generating machine that also benefits the people generating the attention, aka tokenholders, we are going to do it live

CT mostly read it as a victory lap. I read it about ten times, because I run a scanner on his wallet and the on-chain picture matches the sentence too closely for it to be a throwaway line. It is a compressed spec. Four claims, each one doing work, so it is worth taking apart slowly.

"Nobody has figured out"

Start with the priority claim, because it sounds arrogant and is mostly just true.

The attention economy has a structural bug that predates crypto. Platforms capture the value of attention, creators negotiate a cut, and the audience that actually produces the attention gets content and nothing else. YouTube runs on this. TikTok runs on this. It works, but everyone at the bottom of it is a renter.

Crypto has spent six years trying to fix that bug and kept shipping the same failure under new branding. Social tokens in 2020 priced access to creators and asked the fans to pay it. BitClout tokenized people, mostly without asking them. friend.tech put fandom on a bonding curve and worked right up until the only reason to buy, selling to the next guy, ran out of next guys. The 2024 celebrity coin wave was the bluntest version yet: launch, dump on the audience, apologize on a podcast. Different mechanisms, identical flow of funds. Attention flowed up, money flowed up, and the fan was always the counterparty.

Notice what none of these had: revenue. There was nothing underneath any of them except the next buyer. Which is why the next phrase in the tweet is the one that matters most.

"A persistent revenue generating machine"

Here is the machine, mechanically, because rounding it off to "influencer gives away money" misses the design.

Pump.fun pays token creators a cut of every trade. $ANSEM's creator position ended up with Ansem, and at current volume it generates about $100,000 a day in fees. Annualized, that is an eight-figure income stream denominated in SOL, produced by trading activity rather than by selling supply. In late June he committed those fees to the people trading the token, after telling pump.fun in public that the trenches needed a stimmy. He has kept to it in a way you can audit. The first round sent about $7 million across more than 700 wallets over a single late-June weekend, and the running total is around $15 million.

I can add my own receipts. My scanner has processed 2,215 transactions from his token account as of this morning. 69.7 million tokens have left it, a hair under 7 percent of total supply, spread across 976 recipient wallets. At today's price that is over $22 million in distributed value, against a market cap that crossed $300 million this week. The table updates live, on-chain, here.

The loop closes like this. Fees fund giveaways. Giveaways become stories, and stories are content. Content pulls attention, attention pulls volume, and volume pays the fees for the next round. The analysis he boosted this week (The Ansem Experiment, which calls the model "MrBeast on steroids") lays out the same cycle, and the fact that he amplified it tells you he considers it a fair reading.

"Persistent" is the word CT skipped over. Every airdrop you have ever farmed was a marketing expense: a budget, spent once, gone. This one is closer to a dividend funded by usage. As long as the token trades, the machine has payroll.

"The people generating the attention, aka tokenholders"

This clause is the actual innovation, and it is the part MrBeast himself could never ship.

Channels at MrBeast's scale all hit the same lifecycle problem eventually: formats exhaust themselves, the spectacle has to keep inflating, the audience numbs out. His answer was to make the audience the show. Ordinary people win life-changing money on camera, every winner becomes a story, every story recruits people who had never watched the channel, and the format never wears out because the participants are always new. But look at the ownership structure underneath it. The audience generates the attention, the attention becomes ad revenue and brand deals, and the value lands with MrBeast and the platform. Participants get prizes. The audience at large gets entertainment. The flywheel is real, the audience just owns none of it.

Now look at who generates $ANSEM's attention. An account with 7,500 followers wrote the sharpest analysis of the project so far and did 200,000 views in a day. Creators are filming themselves handing tokens to strangers in real life and the clips are crossing from CT into TikTok on their own momentum. I built a scanner for his wallet because I wanted numbers nobody was publishing. None of us were hired, and the design's answer to "then why would they" is the same word every time: holders.

That is what "aka tokenholders" is doing in the sentence. In every previous version of the attention economy, generating the attention and owning the upside were separate roles filled by separate people. Here they are the same role. When he promised this week to make up, in full, every $ANSEM post whose exposure his broken notifications missed, that was the model stated as policy: post about it, get paid from the fee stream. A creator fund with no application form, run out of a wallet, settled in the asset itself. He is even asking his own timeline how TikTok posting works, which reads as a joke until you remember that X is his home field and this phase of the plan is about leaving it.

The reach math here is easy to underestimate. Ansem is about as famous as a person can get inside crypto, and that fame comes with a hard ceiling: the million followers already have wallets. Onboarding, by definition, happens past the edge of your own audience. But nobody's reach actually stops at their follower count. It extends through their group chats, their family, their coworkers, and behind each of those people sits another layer of the same. A drop big enough to matter becomes a story that jumps those layers on its own, and when one lands on someone who already has an audience, an entire unrelated network watches a life change in real time. One of the June drops was worth over a million dollars. Moments like that do not need ad spend to travel.

My scanner adds one number I find more interesting than the headline totals. Of the 69.7 million tokens dropped so far, about a quarter are still held. People sold the rest, and for some recipients that was rent money in a bear market, which is roughly what "the trenches needed a stimmy" meant. But a sold airdrop is not a failed airdrop. Each of those 976 wallets belongs to someone who now has a funded wallet, a story they have told at least once, and a reason to look up the next announcement. Graded as a loyalty program that number looks mediocre. Graded as an onboarding funnel, the tuition simply got paid in reverse, and the student kept the account.

"We are going to do it live"

The last clause answers the two objections a careful skeptic would raise, so take them in order.

First, concentration. One wallet holds roughly 60 percent of supply, and for any other memecoin that stat ends the conversation. The reason it reads differently here is that the position is not really a trading stake. It is a reputation, made liquid. Ansem spent multiple cycles building the kind of trust that cannot be forked or fundraised, and $ANSEM converts it into what amounts to the largest discretionary marketing budget in crypto: nine figures at current prices, answerable to no board, deployable as giveaways no company could match. He does not hide that his stake appreciates as the loop spins. It is stated plainly in the article he boosted. Doing it live means doing it with the incentives visible, and betting that visible incentives plus a reputation worth more than any single exit will hold. So far the market agrees.

Second, timing, which is the part that convinced me personally. This did not catch fire in a bull tape. It caught fire during the deadest stretch the trenches have had in a long while, volume bleeding out, attention elsewhere, and still went from a doorstep token to a $300 million market cap in under three weeks. Recycled degen liquidity does not behave that way in a dead market. It rotates, and the pool never grows. What grew this was attention arriving from outside: the token trending under business and finance on X, IRL drop clips circulating on TikTok, write-ups appearing from people who do not normally cover memecoins. New money has a different signature than rotated money, and this run has it.

And the landing for that new money already exists, which is the quiet half of the operation. Bullpen gives a newcomer one website where the token can be bought and the drops received, with none of the bridging ceremony that kills first sessions. Market Bubble is the weekly show that turns a market running 24/7 into something a normal person can learn by watching. Underneath both, Solana keeps the first hour painless, which regulars stopped noticing years ago but is the entire difference between a TikTok viewer and a wallet owner. I wrote about that in the last post. The pieces were not assembled by accident.

The part nobody is pricing

2017 onboarded people through ICO greed. 2021 onboarded them through lockdown boredom and leverage. Price pulled those people in, and price walked them back out. What is being attempted now is onboarding through people, one network vouching for the next, funded by fees instead of emissions, landing on rails that do not punish beginners. Betubfin put it well: every holder who arrives through $ANSEM discovers Solana, learns what a wallet is, watches a memecoin actually function, often for the first time. And the place they land matters: this is not onboarding into a screenshot of a chart, it is onboarding into the one chain where a newcomer can go from spectator to participant in an afternoon, where value gets created and not just traded. The token is the gateway. The ecosystem is the destination, and from up close in the data this does not look like an airdrop event at all. It looks like a new market being opened, person by person.

I do not know whether it reaches his stated target of a million holders. Nobody knows the ceiling of a machine that has never been run before, which is what experiment means. But holding $ANSEM today is a different object from holding any memecoin before it. It is a claim on future rounds of the fee stream, a seat in the experiment, and a share of the attention you generate yourself by talking about it. Ansem's whole bet is that this alignment, run honestly and in public, compounds in a way no one can model from the outside.

He said nobody had figured it out. He said they would do it live. The machine is running in public right now, and you can watch it work.