Last year, the handful of moderators at V2EX, including me, were dealing with massive spam every day. It was emotionally taxing, as every time I had to do something, I felt that my time should have a better use than this.
So I made a decision to turn the website into invite-only. New accounts can only be activated with an invite code. Invite codes can only be created with gold coins, an offchain virtual currency system that has been running on the website since 2010.
It reduced spam to almost zero, as now it takes much more effort for spammers to create new accounts. However, some new users were unable to participate because they knew no one who could create an invite for them.
Also in September last year, I played with a new product called Pump and created a coin with it. Everything on Pump looked so crazy, so after I created the coin, I did not give too much thought to it at that time.
Several months passed. A lot of crazier things happened in real life.
This year I read this post on Farcaster by balajis.eth:
https://farcaster.xyz/balajis.eth/0x8a740c74
His theory is: a token can give a community shared purpose.
So I decided to do something to see the theory working.
I started to buy my own Pump while working on adding Phantom/Glow support to the website. I was testing how different coin/Solana levels would work best with several use cases. Then at one point, people watching onchain activities noticed my activities, and they pushed the coin to what it is right now.
Now we have over 1000 onchain holders, and more than 400 of them linked their addresses to V2EX after we launched the Sign in with Solana feature.
I can feel that shared purposes are forming. Thank you @balajis and everyone holding the coin.