$BONSAI Reaches ~$100 Million Fully Diluted Valuation

MadFi, the seasoned team of builders and creators behind Bonsai token ($BONSAI), have closed a $1 Million angel round to celebrate the momentum behind $BONSAI, the only token incentive (memecoin) seeded across the Lens network. Since its drop on March 4, 2024, the $BONSAI token has quickly become a culture and economic currency on Lens, kickstarting a fast-growing social and monetization economy and reaching a ~$100MM fully diluted valuation, according to CoinGecko. MadFi enables creators to monetize, reward and grow their communities in crypto social - with $BONSAI as the leading driver.

The angel round was led by Palm Tree Crew (PTC) Crypto, Avara Ventures, and Social Graph Ventures with participation from Friends with Benefits, Refraction, other angel investors, including Boys Club Inc, Fire Eyes 🔥_🔥, Robert Leshner, Spencer Noon and Sandeep Nailwal.

"BONSAI's integration with the Lens community, already achieving over 80% of paid mints, is impressive," said Brett Shear of PTC Crypto, a Lens investor. "We're excited to see the community adopting BONSAI for user acquisition and engagement across the diverse application ecosystem, especially as a creation of early Lens builders."

“We are excited to see $BONSAI become the default currency on Lens,” said Carlos Beltran, Co-founder and CEO, MadFi. “$BONSAI demonstrates the power of onchain networks coupled with great content. By rewarding content and engagement, $BONSAI has effortlessly become an integral part of Lens, encouraging monetization experimentation – from in-feed token swaps to gamified staking and novel advertising models.”

Believing that tokens can align platforms, creators and users, MadFi aims to build capabilities to support the creator economy – worth an estimated $460B by 2027.* Since 10% of $BONSAI was airdropped on Lens to ~4.5K profiles, the popularity of $BONSAI as a memecoin for payments has grown rapidly and organically. The value of the coin has soared 310.58% in one month. Creators on Lens have earned over $3MM $BONSAI ($240K USD as of April 4).

$BONSAI has generated much excitement and engagement, being used as a monetization and rewards layer on Lens. Using Lens Open Actions or “Smart Posts'' that have an onchain action attached to them - users can rent their posts for advertising space, reward engagement, and use DeFi; all from the social feed. Since its launch, $BONSAI has rapidly taken over wMATIC as the currency of choice for monetizable content. In March, $BONSAI market share of Lens collected publications was around 77%, reaching a peak of almost 90% of paid mints in the last week**.

The team behind $BONSAI has been building on Lens Protocol since the protocol’s launch in 2022 and share the Lens ethos of content ownership, social graph portability, and onchain social actions. While traditional social platforms lack effective monetization options for creators, Lens Protocol provides a much better alternative, especially for creators of long tail content who might otherwise be marginalized. $BONSAI has become a means for content creators to build an audience, reward participants, earn revenue and support content development. Content creators can monetize and Lens participants become aligned, rewarding each other and bringing value to the ecosystem.

About MadFi

MadFi is a crypto social platform that enables creators to monetize, reward and grow their communities in crypto social. MadFi protocol features include crypto subscriptions for gated content, onchain loyalty to measure and reward engagement, content bounties for automated influencer marketing, and a variety of other Lens-native features via Open Actions.

*Source Goldman Sachs

**Source OurNetwork