POAP, the company, 2019 to 2026
POAP, the Proof of Attendance Protocol, began as a hackathon project at ETHDenver in February 2019: about 100 ERC-721 badges for the people who were there (The Block). Patricio Worthalter came up with it. Seven years later nearly 7.6 million POAPs had been minted by about 46,000 issuers, and the company behind them was winding down. The tokens stay on-chain. This page is the short version of the research in poap-archive, where every claim carries its source.
Timeline
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2019-02 | The first POAPs, at the ETHDenver hackathon (The Block). |
| 2020-10 | Gas costs push minting from Ethereum to the xDai sidechain, later Gnosis Chain (IQ.wiki). In the final snapshot, 98% of all POAPs are on it. |
| 2021-10 | “POAP farmers” and bots overwhelm claims and force POAP to scale back (Decrypt). Manual curation of every drop follows. |
| 2022-01-19 | POAP Inc. announces a $10M seed round co-led by Archetype and Sapphire Sport, with more than 2 million POAPs minted (Decrypt). |
| 2022 | The peak year for new drops: 27,172 created (local snapshot). |
| 2023-01 | POAP surveys issuers about paid features. Jamie answers with POAP as a Business. |
| 2023-04-17 | Paid issuance begins for commercial issuers, at about $1 a POAP. Personal use stays free (Decrypt). |
| 2023 | A new issuer interface, POAP Drops, plus POAP Family and Checkout (POAP News). |
| 2024-01 | Email onboarding with an embedded wallet and an onpoap.eth name. Jamie tries it in New POAP Onboarding Process. |
| 2024 | The POAP Home app, GPS minting, Airship, and minting on Base, Arbitrum and ApeChain (POAP News). |
| 2026-01-01 | The POAP Airport Rally 2026 begins: GPS-minted POAPs at more than 100 airports (Airship). |
| 2026-03-16 | Maintenance mode. No new issuers and no active development, announced by Isabel Gonzalez on 2026-03-12 (X; The Defiant). |
| 2026-06-30 | poaparchive.com is registered, by POAP Inc (WHOIS). Its first snapshot follows on 2026-07-02. |
| 2026-07-31 | The last drop is created, #229257 (local snapshot). No public announcement names this date. |
| 2026-08-03 | Gonzalez announces: “After 5+ years, we’re winding down POAP” (X; The Block). |
| 2026-08-20 | poaparchive.com’s final snapshot: 73,990 public drops and 6,218,154 tokens (poaparchive.com). |
| 2026-10-17 | The gallery, collectors site, help center and docs all redirect to poap.xyz. Jamie’s archive is captured. |
The people
Patricio Worthalter is the founder; his X bio reads “Founder of Proof of Attendance Protocol.” Isabel Gonzalez, COO in 2022 and later co-founder and general manager, was the public voice of the company’s operations and of its end (Decrypt). The brand line was Worthalter’s: “POAPs are bookmarks for your life.” The mission, on poap.xyz: “We mint POAPs so people can own their stories.”
The business
Minting started free, with POAP paying the gas. Farming in 2021 brought manual curation, which cost money and slowed issuers down. Commercial pricing in 2023 kept personal use free; Gonzalez said then, “We like people creating true precious digital collectibles more than we care that they pay” (Decrypt). The agency arm, POAP Studio, served brands such as Coinbase, American Express, Bayer and Porsche, but brand deals were one-off revenue (LikeCoin). POAP never launched a token, a choice commentators read as principled and as a closed door to crypto’s usual funding (CryptoBriefing). No later round was reported.
Drops created each year, from the official snapshot: 2019, 74; 2020, 477; 2021, 11,811; 2022, 27,172; 2023, 17,542; 2024, 8,209; 2025, 6,994; 2026, 1,711 to the end of July.
The wind-down
The maintenance-mode post said the platform had found a niche but “did not grow much beyond it.” The wind-down post blamed “crypto’s funding cycles and distribution dynamics,” which made it hard to build a sustainable company without “cannibalizing the ethos that made POAP mean something.” It named no final service date, no migration plan and no successor (Times of Blockchain).
Molly White’s Web3 is Going Just Great quoted POAP’s promise that memories would “last forever” (link). BlockEden pointed at transferable tokens, which made weak credentials, and at rivals taking the niches (link). LikeCoin called it a “tragic” case of idealism meeting economics (link).
The archives
- poaparchive.com, registered by POAP Inc: a SQLite and WebP snapshot of every public drop and token, about 15 GB. Jamie’s archive holds the 2026-08-20 copy.
- poap.in, by Kira of Glory Lab: serves the official snapshot with its own captures of collections and holdings (GitHub).
- POAP Saver, by Ben Meadows: event metadata and artwork published to IPFS.
POAPin’s archive opens with the line that fits them all: “POAP is dead. Long live POAP!”