The Illusion of "Visualizing Passion": What Fans Actually Wanted, and What Blockchain Should Have Built Instead

## 1. The Collective Failure of "Passion Visualization" Projects From around 2017, "artist × blockchain" projects took off in earnest. Audius (token-rewarded music streaming), Royal (fractionalized song royalties), Chiliz/Socios.com (governance-token-gated club voting), various Music NFT platforms, and social-token infrastructure like Rally were the headline examples. They shared one design assumption: that fans' support could be turned into a measurable signal, then converted into economic value via a token. The numbers are unambiguous. More than 70 clubs — including FC Barcelona, Manchester City, and AC Milan — have launched fan tokens via Socios.com, and platform users grew from 1M in 2021 to over 2M by end-2024. Yet all fan tokens combined now trade at roughly $240M market cap, and CHZ itself sits about 95% below its 2021 peak of $0.95. In NFTs broadly, trading volumes had dropped 95% from their 2021 highs by 2023. Rally wound down in 2023, and Music NFT marketplaces such as Catalog and Sound have either shut down or sharply contracted. ## 2. Meanwhile, Non-Blockchain Platforms Opened Entirely New Markets During the same window, non-blockchain creator platforms grew explosively. In its FY2024 (year ended November 30, 2024), OnlyFans recorded $7.22B in gross fan payments, $520M in net profit, 4.6M creator accounts, and 377M fan accounts. Patreon's 2024 revenue was estimated to approach $800M. Twitch viewers watched over 1 trillion minutes in 2020, with 7M+ active streamers monthly. HYBE's Weverse hit 10M monthly active users (90% from outside South Korea), with average dwell time of 250 minutes per user per month over 10.2 visit-days, and turned profitable on an annual basis for the first time in 2025. What these platforms sell is not a token. It is parasocial intimacy and the tiered ability to purchase moments of recognition. Patreon's monthly memberships, OnlyFans' DMs and PPV, Twitch's subs and Super Chats, Weverse's handwritten artist replies and private messages. What fans paid for was never an investment stake — it was the moment of being seen. ## 3. The "What the Customer Really Wanted" Mistranslation Software engineering has a famous cartoon satirizing how requirements get distorted: the customer's request, the PM's interpretation, the engineer's build, and the actual delivery all differ — when what the customer really wanted was a tire swing. Blockchain's passion-visualization category is a textbook instance of that failure. Fans' literal words were "I want to support my artist more" and "cut out the middlemen." Projects translated this as "make fans into shareholders." But Benji Rogers, who teaches music business at Berklee Online, asked the right question: if you sell your fans a digital picture for $100 telling them "hold it, it might be worth more," and the price collapses, what has that done to your relationship with that fan? A fan turned investor becomes a betrayed supporter the moment prices fall — the design did not visualize passion, it converted passion into a financial instrument and corrupted it in the process. The real demand was not financial upside but meaningful recognition. Twitch Super Chats, OnlyFans DMs, Weverse artist replies — these run from cents to a few dollars and offer no token appreciation. The category still scaled into the tens of billions because what fans were buying was the access that nudges a one-sided parasocial bond toward the "one-and-a-half-sided" zone. ## 4. Where Blockchain Genuinely Belongs None of this argues that blockchain is irrelevant. It argues that the technology starts working only once the financialization-of-passion exit is abandoned. Three directions look genuinely promising. First, programmable event ticketing. Smart-contract-enforced resale caps, automatic revenue splits, and identity-bound transfers solve real, persistent damage (bot scalping, predatory resale) that Web2 systems have failed to fix. Both artists and fans benefit. Second, royalty infrastructure for collaborative content. Modern music routinely involves 10+ rights holders across producers, songwriters, and sample owners. Smart contracts that route payments in real time work not as a fan-facing feature, but as a trust-cost-reducer between creators. Third, portable fan identity. A verifiable record of "I have been supporting this artist since 2015" that travels across platforms. This is not an asset to be traded — it is a fan's history persisted as their own property, surviving even when a platform shuts down. That single property is the strongest differentiator against centralized platforms like Weverse. What blockchain should solve is not the visualization of passion. It is the back-office of trust and operating cost reduction, without damaging the passion itself. The winners of the next decade will not pitch fans on becoming investors — they will run silently as infrastructure, never asking fans to open a wallet. ## Business Development Insights 1. Design the "moment of recognition," not the "visualization of fandom." The common thread among the past decade's winners (Patreon, OnlyFans, Twitch, Weverse) is not equity-style token issuance but the tiered sale of moments of individual recognition. New projects should define "what moment of being seen does our service offer fans" before designing any token mechanic. 2. Compete on back-office function, not user-facing token UX. Failed projects placed tokens at the center of the user experience. The next generation will use blockchain where users never see it: ticketing controls, real-time multi-party royalty splits, cross-platform fan-history attestation. The path to mass adoption is "never make the user open a wallet." 3. Separate fans' literal words from their actual demand. Fans say "I want to support my artist," but that should not be translated as "I want to be an investor." Product planning must validate demand structure with behavioral data (OnlyFans average $5–25 subscriptions, Weverse 250 minutes/month dwell time) rather than verbatim research quotes. Across the past decade, intimacy — not investment yield — was the dominant willingness-to-pay driver. ## Sources [1] OnlyFans 2024 Revenue, Hypebeast (Aug 2025) — https://hypebeast.com/2025/8/onlyfans-2024-revenue-7-2-billion-usd-nine-percent-increase-report [2] HYBE Earnings Call: Weverse Profitability, Music Business Worldwide (Feb 2026) — https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/hybes-us-restructure-weverse-turns-profitable-and-concerts-boom-3-things-to-know-from-the-k-pop-giants-latest-earnings-call/ [3] Chiliz & Fan Token Ecosystem Analysis, BeInCrypto (May 2025) — https://bitcoinethereumnews.com/tech/technical-and-fundamental-analysis-of-the-chiliz-and-fan-token-ecosystem/ [4] HYBE Weverse U.S. Strategy, Billboard (Apr 2025) — https://www.billboard.com/pro/hybe-weverse-bts-k-pop-stars-us/ [5] Music NFTs: What You Need to Know, Berklee Online (Oct 2025) — https://online.berklee.edu/takenote/music-nfts-what-you-need-to-know-as-a-musician-and-fan/ [6] Crypto Crashes for Music Artists, Live Music Blog (Aug 2025) — https://livemusicblog.com/blogs/music-blog/crypto-crescendos-crashes-music-artists-wrong-notes-blockchain/ [7] Creator Subscription Platforms, Mobile Ecosystem Forum (Aug 2025) — https://mobileecosystemforum.com/2025/08/19/creator-subscription-platforms-onlyfans-patreon-etc-are-redefining-monetisation-content-and-compliance-in-the-digital-economy/ [8] Primer on the Parasocial Economy, Every (Oct 2021) — https://every.to/cybernaut/a-primer-on-the-parasocial-economy