cookie(dot)fun: from viral AI Agents tracker to 7-figure InfoFi revenue engine

Problem

Capture crypto attention markets fast, then turn that attention into revenue, and add $COOKIE token utility.

Solution

Led UX across 4 iterations of cookie.fun (B2C market tracker), expanding from AI agents (Dec 2024) to all crypto, then layered Cookie Snaps on top (May 2025) — a revenue layer where projects ran social campaigns (InfoFi) and rewarded creators, with $COOKIE staking unlocking boosts. Final iteration (late 2025) added a Capital Launchpad and a full visual overhaul.

Result

200K MAU in first month, Binance & Coinbase listings, 3M+ MAU in 6 months, 7-figure revenue, and $17.1M TVD (Total Value Distributed).

Stage 1: The AI Agents breakout (late 2024)

The AI Agents narrative was blowing up and nobody had built a tracker for it yet. We had days to move, not weeks, so the first decisions weren't about polish — they were about speed and tone.

I leaned hard into a "degen" feel. Intentionally rough, almost like nobody had designed it. In crypto that's a feature, not a bug — polish looks corporate, rough looks native, and the people we needed were already scrolling their feeds. We were live in a few days and a few sleepless nights.

The real trick was making the product market itself. Every dashboard was built to be screenshotted, watermark and all, so every share on Twitter pulled people back in for free. The piece that stuck was a heatmap I designed with image fill — first time anyone had done it that way. Competitors copied it pretty quickly after.

It took off because we were simply the first index, live right when the narrative peaked. 200K MAU in the first month, then listings on Binance and Coinbase (premier worldwide exchanges). That traction also kicked off the B2B side — first Cookie API sales, plus partnerships with Virtuals Protocol, CoinGecko, GeckoTerminal, and CoinStats.

The thing I took from this: when you're racing a narrative, design for how the thing spreads before you worry about the thing itself.

Stage 2: Expansion to all crypto (early 2025)

Once the format proved out, it was obvious the same approach — indexing attention and mindshare — could cover all of crypto, not just agents. The hard part was growing the product up without killing the speed that made it work.

The AI Agents tracker was moved onto its own domain and I rebuilt the main platform on our B2B design system so it actually held together as a real product. Added support for all crypto sectors, introduced a custom Sentiment metric, and designed a Key Events layer that surfaced whatever was creating noise around a given project.

The way I worked stayed scrappy — Excalidraw sketches, sitting directly with the CEO and CPO, shipping fast without long discovery cycles. Mobile got serious attention here, since most casual users were checking this stuff on their phones. I rebuilt it to feel app-like, leaning on progressive disclosure so the small screen showed the right amount at the right moment instead of cramming everything in.

Stage 3: Cookie Snaps — token utility and revenue layer (May 2025)

We had the attention. Now we had to make money off it and give the token something real to do — without wrecking the experience that got people there in the first place.

Cookie Snaps was how. Projects ran social campaigns and rewarded creators, and $COOKIE staking unlocked mindshare boosts. I built it on top of Cookie Affiliate, an earlier product, kept its invite-only mechanic, and designed the whole thing to spread.

A few things made it go. Shareable Social Cards with vanity metrics built right in, so every metric was screenshot-bait that carried the brand. Invite codes that gave early creators with big networks a real edge and paid them in extra Snaps for it. And vanity metrics on profiles purely because people love posting them — Top % in total crypto mindshare, smart engagement, smart followers, where "smart" meant our AI had tagged you as someone who actually matters on Crypto Twitter. On top of that, badges per project and a bunch of leaderboards — top mindshare, top bullish, top bearish — plus a special badge for the OGs who'd been with us since Cookie Affiliate.

25,825 creators joined in a single day. For a while there the whole Crypto Twitter feed was Snaps, vanity screenshots, invite codes, and people hunting for those codes.

Under the hood we made the token do actual work. Burning 10,000 $COOKIE locked a project's mindshare leaderboard, which meant no project could quietly hand out rewards on their own — they had to come buy a campaign from us first. The viral part and the business part now were the same machine.

Stage 4: Maturing — Capital Mindshare, launchpad, full redesign (late 2025)

Scaling that fast came with the usual mess — AI slop, people gaming the rewards, engagement farming with nothing real behind it. This phase was about putting the rigor back in and pulling everything into one coherent product.

Snaps turned into Mindshare as the core idea, then we added Capital Mindshare, which factored in what people actually held and how they moved capital. Backing your words with real money counted for way more than just making noise. Those campaigns cost more and were aimed straight at the AI slop problem. Then a third type, Alpha Mindshare campaign, for the high-risk high-reward projects where we were willing to skip some due diligence for reach.

We pushed InfoFi into trading too, with Pacifica — a perp DEX — through a custom leaderboard tied to volume run through our referral link.

The whole platform got a proper redesign at this point, finally off the B2B system the consumer side had been borrowing. Snaps got rebuilt and woven into the platform instead of sitting on top of it. One language, one set of pieces, one product.

The launchpad came out of all this. We had a big chunk of the InfoFi market by then, which let us team up with Legion.cc to give top creators on the leaderboards access to pre-sales. We sold the launchpad to projects already running campaigns — so we weren't just upselling Capital Mindshare campaigns, we were helping them raise money on our platform, with the top creators getting guaranteed allocations. Attention turned into leaderboards, leaderboards into campaigns, campaigns into raises.

Reflection

cookie.fun started as a few days of work to catch a trend and ended up a full ecosystem — attention, revenue, token utility, a launchpad — all finally speaking the same design language.

What stuck with me: when you're chasing a narrative, how the product spreads matters more than how it looks. The screenshot-readiness and watermarks in every important component did more for us than any growth feature.

Building revenue as a layer on something people already use beats launching a separate product. Snaps worked because the audience was already there, and the token mattered because it became load-bearing.

And growing a viral product up mostly means putting back the discipline you skipped to move fast. Capital Mindshare wasn't really a new feature — it was making conviction count again after people had figured out how to game the old system.