Community · Trust & safety · Founder
Building a safe marketplace before I was hired
At 15, I ran an unofficial Sweatcoin community. When members started trading Sweatcoins for real money, and scammers followed, I built a safe exchange for them instead of shutting it down.
- 10K+
- Members in my unofficial Discord
- +7,500
- Members on the exchange
- ~$0.08
- Average value per Sweatcoin traded
At a glance
- The problem
- Members were trading Sweatcoins for real money in our unofficial communities, and scammers followed.
- What I did
- Opened a dedicated exchange with a middleman service, trusted staff around the world and strict trading rules.
- The outcome
- 7,500 more members, hundreds of thousands of Sweatcoins traded safely, and the attention of Sweatcoin's founders.
The receipts
The full story: context, approach, examples and results.
Context
In 2018, at 15, I started a community of my own on Discord and Reddit, and owned r/sweatcoin. It grew to more than 10,000 members on Discord. Back then you could send Sweatcoins to other users, and the app had deals that gave them a real value, like 20,000 SWC for $1,000 in PayPal. Members noticed and started trading. So did the scammers.
The challenge
Keep members safe without shutting down something they clearly wanted, with a volunteer team and no budget.
What I did
Instead of banning trading, we built a home for it: the Unofficial Sweatcoin Exchange, a separate community just for trading.
Strict rules came first. New traders started with low limits, any trade above a set value had to go through a middleman, and scammers were banned.
I set up the middleman service and staffed it with trusted members spread across the world. Traders don't keep office hours, so cover had to run around the clock, with help in members' own languages.
Results
The exchange grew by another 7,500 members, and hundreds of thousands of Sweatcoins were exchanged every week, at an average of about $0.08 each, with the rules keeping people safe.
It caught the founders' attention. Sweatcoin staff started joining, we hosted our first Q&As with them in 2018, and in 2019 I joined the support team.
It was scrappy and volunteer-run, but the core ideas carried straight into the official communities I built later: global, round-the-clock cover and support in members' own languages.
Trust is built into the rules. People trade, talk and stay where they know they're safe.
- Discord
- Trust & safety
- Moderation