With the advent of any new technology, it is difficult to imagine what kinds of applications it could enable. AI continues to globally captivate businesses, developers, and consumers in every category. While AI continues to find its place in every aspect of life, there are two areas it hasn’t quite found its stride: crypto and consumer.
Through Onchain Labs, we’re committed to fostering innovation in blockchain applications. Today, we’re excited to announce our collaboration with a team that continues to impress:
@Simcluster is a parallel digital society at the intersection of AI, crypto, gaming, and social media, created specifically to embrace the era of AI slop. Widespread access to AI models has triggered a surge of slop across social media feeds. It’s easy to see that it will be difficult to discern slop from reality very soon. Webster selected “slop” as the 2025 word of the year, further cementing this phenomenon into culture.
Simcluster takes a maximalist position on slop — instead of fighting it, they believe that “the only way out is through.” The app offers a gamified social experience where the goal is simple: create engaging AI-generated content to climb the leaderboard and earn clout. Simcluster utilizes its own in-app content studio to enable users to seamlessly create and edit text, images, video, and music. The scope of studio output will expand dramatically as AI continues to evolve, where Simcluster will be a dedicated tool for the creation of new worlds, programs, games, and agents.
Simcluster utilizes a “hyperprompting” system, enabling users to efficiently mold model outputs without prior prompting experience. Hyperprompting is to prompting as vibecoding is to programming. It lets users create masterpieces without requiring Altman-levels of prompting experience.
Sound easy? There’s a catch.
Simcluster limits content to the output of its concept system.
Simcluster is built on three fundamental components: concepts, content, and clout. Users can create concepts out of anything. These concepts are composable building blocks that enable users to create content. Concepts can best be compared to LLM prompts. All info within a concept’s definition will be directly used to generate content. Whenever a concept is used, the creator of that concept earns virtual currency, known as clout. Clout is both an in-game currency and social credit engine that inspires users, known colloquially as “simulants,” to keep playing, or “clusting.”
To create concepts or content, users must spend clout. The more clout a user has, the higher they are on the leaderboard. The higher a user is on the leaderboard, the easier it is to earn more clout. Users also earn clout anytime somebody engages with their content. Clout is not a tradable asset, has zero monetary value, and exists solely for *pun intended* social clout.
These gamified mechanics create an engaging virtual world for players to participate in, where a variety of play styles can be used depending on their preference. Concepts serve as an innovative spin on tokenized IP, especially when considering how they are key inputs into content.
We’ve chosen to collaborate with Simcluster to embrace an emerging app in consumer AI. Blockchain games and consumer crypto apps often fail because they over index on speculation. We’ve seen that speculation as a product often loses its fun after all the value leaves, as evidenced by previously popular crypto apps left for dead.
Harvey (@npceo_) and the team have an unrelenting curiosity and drive to create an entertaining, dystopian digital world that keeps users returning for more. Crucially, Simcluster is very different from prior crypto gaming or social ventures, which often suffer from cold start problems due to requiring users to have risk tolerance from day one. Simcluster keeps it simple — play the game, climb the leaderboard, have fun.
It’s important to note that Simcluster has no blockchain elements live today. Although clout is a non-transferrable, free-to-earn virtual currency, we’ve seen that some of the most successful gaming companies in web2 often employ a two-tiered in-game currency model. Simcluster plans to bring its composable concept registry and creator reward system onto Arbitrum. We’re excited to watch the platform grow from an emerging gamified social platform to something much bigger.
Through Onchain Labs, our team will be involved in advisory capacity, assisting with GTM, partnerships, and protocol design. If you’re a hungry founder building something novel in crypto, apply for Onchain Labs here: https://forms.gle/QTWcbZWFYUaoknqN7.
*Disclosure*
Onchain Labs is a collaboration between The Arbitrum Foundation and Offchain, either of which may have a financial interest in Simcluster through investments and/or other commercial arrangements.
