Fundl

Crowdfunding has always had an asymmetry problem. Early backers take the most risk — they commit before a project is proven, before the market has spoken — yet they receive the same perks as someone who backs on the final day. Fundl, a Solana-based crowdfunding platform launched in December 2022, was built to fix that. Its tagline is direct: "Profit from projects you back."

Crowdfunding with Skin in the Game

Fundl focuses on storytelling categories — books, comics, animation, video games, board games, and startups — where independent creators have historically struggled to compete with traditional publishing gatekeepers. The platform's core insight is that backers who come in early should be rewarded for that risk.

Instead of the traditional model where everyone gets the same t-shirt or PDF regardless of when they backed, Fundl structures campaigns so that early supporters have the potential to earn a share of revenue when a project sells out. Backers can also become project ambassadors: promote a campaign through an affiliate-style referral system, climb the leaderboard, and earn payouts proportional to their contributions. The result is a three-sided flywheel — backers are financially motivated to spread the word, creators get organic distribution without a marketing budget, and the platform grows through word-of-mouth rather than paid acquisition.

On the payment side, Fundl is designed to handle both VISA and stablecoin payments, meeting creators and backers where they are rather than requiring a crypto-native onboarding experience. When a campaign closes successfully, funds convert to stablecoins — a key design choice that insulates both creators and backers from token volatility during the production window.

A Grant Layer for Ecosystem Creators

Beyond the standard campaign mechanics, Fundl has positioned itself as an infrastructure layer for Solana ecosystem grant programs. Josip Volarević, Fundl's founder, proposed managing a 3,000 SOL creator grant pool through the platform — effectively adding a grant-matching mechanism where ecosystem funds could be deployed to creators using Fundl's vetting and disbursement infrastructure. The model includes 0% platform fees for ecosystem-backed grants, lowering the barrier for Solana ecosystem organizations to direct capital toward storytelling creators without the overhead of running their own programs.

For creators who do not reach their funding goal, all money is returned. Only campaigns that demonstrate enough community traction to hit their target unlock their funds — a stake-based filter that pushes quality to the surface.

Notable Campaigns

The platform's launch slate has drawn mainstream creative talent that would typically have no reason to look at a crypto-adjacent crowdfunding tool.

Virtual Realiteens is the standout early campaign. Produced by Emmy-winning Australian animation studio StudioNX, it is described as a high-energy genre-blend of high school comedy and virtual reality chaos — think Stranger Things filtered through 1990s action films and retro video games. The voice cast includes Arin Hanson (known online as Egoraptor, co-host of Game Grumps) and JackSepticEye, two YouTube creators with a combined audience exceeding 55 million. The campaign's initial goal was to raise $8,000 to produce a fully animated teaser prototype with professional voice talent and cinematic sound design, with a larger Kickstarter round planned to follow once the teaser proved viability. Virtual Realiteens became Fundl's first fully funded campaign, reaching 100% of its target. Composer Grant Kirkhope, known for Banjo-Kazooie and GoldenEye, has also endorsed the project publicly.

SOLYD Crypto Poker Set occupies a different corner of Fundl's catalog. It is a premium, limited-edition poker set designed around crypto culture — custom chips and cards built for what the campaign calls "degen poker night." The campaign has cleared 58% of its funding goal. It sits at the intersection of Fundl's board games and startups categories and illustrates the platform's range: from prestige animation with major creator talent down to physical collectibles for the crypto-native crowd.

Other campaigns in the pipeline include Aura: The Six Towers (a dark fantasy comic series that also reached 100% funding), The Dark Portal (a sci-fi fantasy comic from StudioNX), and Degen Ape Academy: The Recruits, which brings the Solana NFT brand into narrative territory.

The Builder Behind It

Josip Volarević built Fundl as a deliberate pivot from his previous project, dReaderApp — a Solana-native digital comics platform designed to bring decentralized ownership to comic book publishing. The lessons from dReaderApp, particularly around creator monetization and the difficulty of getting mainstream creators to adopt crypto wallets, shaped Fundl's design philosophy: lead with the crowdfunding use case, downplay the blockchain infrastructure, and make crypto optional rather than mandatory.

His background spans both sides of the ecosystem. Through his work as a consultant with Superteam Balkans, Volarević has helped over 100 founders navigate ecosystem funding, contributing to more than $6 million raised across grants, hackathons, and venture capital. For Fundl specifically, he raised approximately $500,000 in VC funding and has channeled around $200,000 directly to creators through the platform. He presented Fundl at Breakpoint 2025's Superteam Demo Day, marking the project's most prominent public showcase to date.

Why Fundl Fits Solana

Fundl is not pitching crypto to creators. It is pitching crowdfunding — with crypto as the settlement and liquidity layer running underneath. Backers can arrive through standard payment rails; stablecoin conversion happens at campaign close, silently. Creators are not required to understand how any of it works.

This design makes Fundl one of the more credible attempts on Solana to bridge mainstream creative industries and web3 infrastructure without demanding that either side change its behavior first. The platform targets a gap that Kickstarter and Indiegogo have never filled well: creator categories where the audience is passionate, the projects are pre-monetization, and early backers have no mechanism to share in upside if a property breaks through.

Solana's transaction throughput and fee structure make the profit-sharing and affiliate mechanics economically viable at small scale — exactly the kind of $8,000 animated teaser campaign that would be eaten alive by gas costs on other chains. Whether Fundl can build enough campaign volume to sustain the model is still an open question, but the early slate of fully funded campaigns and the caliber of creator talent it has attracted suggest the bridging thesis has at least some traction.