A Czech YouTuber who wants to launch a second channel can land a sponsorship deal, sell merch or take out a loan for equipment. What they cannot do is sell a share of their channel to outsiders the way a startup sells shares to investors. Yet foreign platforms are starting to offer exactly that, treating the creator like an early-stage company.
The furthest along in a regulated form is the American GigaStar, a platform founded in 2022 and based in Chicago, where fans buy the right to a percentage of a specific channel’s future income. The product is called the Channel Revenue Token and, despite the name, has nothing to do with crypto.
According to GigaStar’s documentation, it is a security registered with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under Regulation Crowdfunding, not a cryptocurrency or blockchain token. The token holds a contractual right to a share of the channel’s advertising income for a set period.
How much money has gone through GigaStar
Two figures need to be read separately. As of March 2026, GigaStar says in its own overview that it facilitated 37 creator offerings and raised over $6.9 million for them. That is money that flowed to the creators. The company has also distributed over $1.2 million of advertising income back to token holders, which is the yield investors have so far received from their share. The creator sells the share personally, under regulatory supervision. GigaStar Market is a funding portal registered with the SEC and a member of the self-regulatory organisation FINRA. Its sister company, GigaStar Securities, is a broker-dealer that operates a registered alternative trading system for secondary trading of the tokens.
GigaStar announced its first $1 million in distributed income in December 2025. “This proves that our model isn’t just working, it’s maturing into a recognized market sector,” said Hazem Dawani, co-founder and CEO of GigaStar, at the time. The model copies the logic of an early investment in a company. The investor puts money in before it is clear whether the channel will grow, and bears the risk that no return arrives.
A revenue advance as a second route
Selling a share is not the only way to get capital to a creator before they have earned it. The American Creative Juice, founded in 2021, takes the opposite approach. It gives the creator an advance against future income, without giving up any equity or control over their creative work. The company has raised $20 million, expanded its Juice Funds to $50 million, and was acquired by the fintech Rho in July 2024.
The difference between the two models is the same as the difference between equity and debt in an ordinary company. GigaStar sells a slice of future revenue, and the investor shares both the growth and the downside. Creative Juice lends against income, and the creator repays it from what they earn. Both solve the same problem: a creator has an audience and predictable income, but no easy way to raise money against it for expansion.
The creator capital market and its unregulated branch
The industry has settled on the term creator capital market for the whole category. “It’s the capital market built on top of the creator economy,” said Scott Kitun, CBO of GigaStar, in February 2026, according to Digiday. The form matters less, he argues. It includes selling a stake in a creator’s company to venture capital, selling a catalogue of rights to investors, sharing future income, and launching a meme coin linked to the creator’s name.
The last option sits outside the protection investors get with a regulated offering. In February 2025, the SEC said that the meme coins described in its statement are not an offer or sale of securities. In the same document, the SEC explicitly writes that “neither meme coin purchasers nor holders are protected by the federal securities laws”. Anyone who buys a creator’s token as a meme coin has no right to the information and protection that a buyer of a registered share receives.
MiCA and the exemption for financial instruments
In Europe, the MiCA regulation has applied since 30 December 2024, governing the issuance of crypto-assets and services related to them. One exemption is key for tokenising a creator’s share. MiCA does not cover crypto-assets that fall under other European rules, including those that qualify as financial instruments.
A token that gives a real claim on income or assets is in effect a security, and it is governed by the existing rules for financial instruments, not by the lighter MiCA regime. A meme coin without such a claim falls into a grey zone, similar to the US.
For the European market, this creates two categories. A registered share carries supervision and mandatory disclosure. A token with no backing in assets carries neither.
The market in numbers and the capital gap
In April 2023, Goldman Sachs Research estimated the size of the creator economy at roughly $250 billion, with a projection of about $480 billion by 2027 and a global population of around 50 million creators. The market size is easy to calculate. Capital, however, has been hard to reach for individual creators. Tokenising a share closes this gap with a tool every startup knows. In the regulated version, a share in a creator’s revenue is no longer a rhetorical figure but a security backed by concrete numbers.
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