Born at a 2019 hackathon, POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol) recorded event attendance on-chain, evolving into the standard “on-chain resume” for the Web3 community. Founder Patricio Worthalter steadfastly maintained a non-financialized philosophy, refusing to issue tokens and personally covering operational costs for a long time.
After establishing a corporate entity and raising $10 million in 2021, POAP attempted a commercial transition by partnering with traditional enterprises and introducing paid features. However, user churn, inconsistent revenue, and crypto winter headwinds created mounting operational strain. In August 2026, co-founder Isabel officially announced the wind-down of operations, though over seven million issued POAPs will remain permanently preserved on the Gnosis Chain.
In last week’s newsletter, Over 100 Projects Shut Down in Seven Months: Writing in the Coldest Web3 Bear Market, I touched upon the exit of POAP—a project I hold dear. Citing co-founder Isabel Gonzalez’s March tweet, I noted that POAP was merely entering maintenance mode rather than shutting down completely. Yet, the ink was hardly dry when, on August 3, Isabel explicitly announced on X that POAP is officially winding down (“After 5+ years, we’re winding down POAP”), sharing her personal reflections on the journey.
We mint POAPs so people can own their stories
POAP serves as a personal proof of attendance for events—or in plain terms, a “digital souvenir badge,” or colloquially, “Web3 check-in.”
Short for Proof Of Attendance Protocol, the immediate whiff of technical nuance gives it away: smart readers will guess it originated right from the mind of a tech geek.
In February 2019, during the ETHDenver hackathon, Patricio Worthalter from Buenos Aires first proposed recording attendance credentials on the blockchain. He extended the concepts of Proof of Work and Proof of Stake from computation and capital to physical and digital “presence,” coining the term Proof of Attendance Protocol.
Together with a few teammates, Patricio hacked together a POAP prototype within 72 hours of the hackathon and deployed the initial smart contract to the Ethereum mainnet. Utilizing what was on hand, they had several hundred attendees on-site to scan QR codes and collect the very first batch of POAPs in history—the “ETHDenver 2019 POAP.” It received unanimous acclaim and swiftly became the standard check-in fixture for Web3 community events.
To ensure a seamless minting experience, POAP utilized meta-transactions to cover gas fees on behalf of users. These early costs were absorbed personally by Patricio, who treated POAP as a public good. However, during 2020’s DeFi Summer, transaction fees on the Ethereum mainnet skyrocketed to several dollars a pop—especially for ERC-721 interactions requiring more computational overhead. It is estimated that Patricio personally poured two to three million dollars into gas fees and infrastructure costs for the community. Consequently, in late 2020, POAP migrated to the Ethereum sidechain xDai (later renamed Gnosis Chain), drastically lowering gas costs while absorbing them through xDai subsidies.
Over two years, from event check-ins and token-gated community access to serving as criteria for early-adopter airdrops across major projects, POAP gradually evolved into an “on-chain resume” for Web3 users.
Conceived in 2019 and established in 2021
However, as POAP transitioned from a niche passion project to a core piece of infrastructure serving millions worldwide, the weight of reality set in. The team realized that running an ecosystem of this scale was vastly more expensive than envisioned.
The primary challenge lay in Sybil attacks and rampant airdrop farming. Because collecting a POAP was entirely free, projects issuing airdrops to holders naturally attracted vast swarms of bots and farming studios. Even when a small gathering of dozens of people issued a POAP, thousands of addresses on-chain would try to rush in and claim it.
To preserve the authenticity of attendance and participation credentials, POAP built a manual review team and introduced stringent anti-bot measures—including dynamic Kiosk QR codes and CAPTCHA verifications—which drove up operational and server costs immensely.
With the NFT boom of 2021, even though POAP was never meant for speculation, issuance and user numbers exploded exponentially. The project could no longer rely solely on Patricio’s personal pocket and volunteer enthusiasm. In late 2021, POAP Inc. was officially incorporated, led by co-founder and COO Isabel to spearhead commercialization, announcing a $10 million seed round in January 2022.
Following that, POAP began collaborating with enterprise clients, customizing on-chain check-ins for traditional giants like Adidas, Porsche, Amex, and Goldman Sachs, while introducing pay-per-mint quotas and SAML enterprise-grade authentication. What was originally a free distribution model and simple collection process became increasingly complex.
Unsurprisingly, this pivot met immense resistance. On one hand, a spoiled Web3 community (myself included, likely) had long taken for granted that POAP should be free and unrestricted; as partial paywalls were put up and review thresholds raised, users departed rapidly. On the other hand, enterprise solutions suffered from long sales cycles and one-off payments, failing to build steady recurring revenue. Compounded by fading Web3 narratives, POAP’s operations grew increasingly difficult—and the 2026 bear market was merely the final straw that broke the camel’s back.
Hard to build a sustainable company without cannibalizing the ethos
To talk about POAP, one cannot overlook the geek ethos of its guiding light, Patricio. Yet, it was precisely this ethos that laid the groundwork for POAP’s farewell.
As a seasoned early Ethereum advocate from Argentina, Patricio is a pure crypto philosopher. His original intent for founding POAP was to record genuine human experiences and interpersonal connections on-chain. He firmly insisted on a non-financialized model, repeatedly publicly criticizing airdrop hunters who treated POAP as a speculative tool, and consistently refusing to issue a governance token in an era when almost every Web3 project went for ICO to raise fund. Had they issued a token, the team might still have ample runway to keep exploring the space between reality and ideals.
In her farewell tweet, Isabel reflected: “crypto’s funding cycles and distribution dynamics made it hard to build a sustainable company without cannibalizing the ethos that made POAP mean something.” Though understated, reading between the lines conveys a clear message: “Because we refused to compromise the ideal POAP stood for, we could not sustain the company.” To loosely translate: they preferred to end this five-year idealist experiment rather than trim their sails to fit reality.
Patricio’s principles earned POAP immense respect across the Web3 industry, but they also prevented POAP from turning into a sustainable commercial service. This is the tragic fate of Web3 innovation today: when ideals cannot be monetized and public goods lack sustainable funding mechanisms, even the most beautiful products eventually get swallowed by reality.
Even as the official servers and apps shut down, the 7+ million POAPs already minted remain forever on Gnosis Chain—a permanent testament to our generation’s exploration of Web3, proving we once truly crossed paths and dreamed together.
p.s. In last week’s poll asking which profession people are warned to watch out for most, bookstore clerks took first place with 63%, followed by Web3 practitioners at 31%, leaving triads (3%), scaffolding workers (2%), and soldiers (2%) far behind. I have a friend who happens to be both a Web3 practitioner and a bookstore clerk—what on earth is he supposed to do?
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