Published on January 22, 2026
Watch the video of this panel on Gamma Prime’s YouTube channel:
Keynote speech by Scott Trowbridge (Senior Advisor & Investor at Luffa):
The creative economy is everywhere. It’s shaping culture, markets, and public conversation. There are now over five billion social media users globally and more than 200 million creators worldwide.
Hi everyone, great to be here, and thank you all for coming. My name is Scott Trowbridge. I’m a senior advisor and investor at Loofa. Outside of this role, I’m also part of the founding team at Stability AI, a generative AI media company, and prior to that, I led a team at Circle.
As mentioned, the creative economy is everywhere. It’s shaping culture, markets, and public conversation. Yet despite all this influence, most creators do not own what they create. Today, creator economies look massive on the surface, but they are structurally broken underneath.
Over the next few minutes, I’ll show you why this happened, why Web 2.0 cannot fix it, and how Loofa is building a new foundation for digital ownership.
Let’s start with scale. There are now over five billion social media users globally and more than 200 million creators worldwide—huge numbers. Since 2019 alone, the creator economy has grown more than fourfold, becoming a $200 billion market, and it’s on track to exceed half a trillion dollars within the next decade.
While attention and engagement are exploding, creators remain economically fragile. Why? Because value flows upward—to platforms—not outward to creators. Web 2.0 connected the world, but it did so by centralizing power. Creators made the content, users generated the data, communities built the networks, yet platforms control distribution, ownership, and monetization.
We see this across Meta, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and others. This isn’t a flaw in execution—it’s a flaw in architecture. And creators feel this every day. We speak to them; we’ve heard their feedback.
They depend on opaque feeds they don’t control. They face friction in cross-border payments. They chase vanity metrics that rarely translate into income. And most importantly, they can’t take their audiences with them.
At Loofa, we’re focused on changing that. Our goal isn’t to replace social platforms. Instead, we absorb what works—reach and connectivity—and fix what’s broken: extraction and lock-in.
Loofa is built on three fundamental layers. First, a social operating system that restores transparent distribution. Second, a tokenized fan economy that aligns incentives. And third, a super-connector that unifies identity, access, and monetization. Loofa is core infrastructure—not just another app.
It’s designed for an AI-native, tokenized internet. It’s decentralized by default, secure by architecture, and composable across blockchains. Creators don’t just publish—they operate digital economies within Loofa. And fans don’t just follow—they participate directly.
At the center of Loofa is something we call a channel. A channel is a programmable digital asset container that unifies ownership, identity, payments, content, loyalty, and AI into a single structure. With one click, creators can issue tokens, launch memberships, stream content, deploy agents, and share upside directly with their community. This isn’t monetization bolted on—it’s AI-native economic design.
Under the hood, Loofa is fundamentally different from traditional digital platforms. Messages are fully encrypted—we cannot read or monetize private communications. There are no phone numbers, no email lock-in, no centralized content databases. Governance is fully on-chain. Rules are transparent, accountability is verifiable, and trust isn’t promised—it’s enforced.
This architecture creates a powerful flywheel. The more creators build channels, the more fans participate economically. Creators own their income, fans gain access to upside and reputation, and the platform scales through alignment—not exploitation, like traditional Web 2.0. Followers become stakeholders.
And this is already working. Growth has been organic and creator-driven, not advertiser-driven. We now have over one million registered users on the application. In Madrid, we launched a hub that grew from zero to 5,000 subscribers in just ten days—entirely within the Loofa app. We onboarded over 50 creators, representing more than 150 million community followers.
Loofa continues to scale, and we’re working with leading partners like Universal Music, Alibaba, and TikTok. This is all driven by a simple insight: ownership changes behavior.
AI is transforming how content is created—I’ve seen this firsthand over the past three to four years. Web3 is redefining who owns that content. Loofa is the bridge between the two—from social media to sovereign media, from followers to stakeholders, from extractive platforms to shared ecosystems.
We’re not building another social network. We’re building the internet’s value layer.
That’s a wrap. Thank you very much for listening.
