Until this summer, fans who bought a share of a YouTuber's future ad revenue on GigaStar had one option: hold the token and collect monthly payouts.

Net Influencer reports that GigaStar Trading, a secondary market soft-launched to the public in July, changed that — holders can now sell their stakes as long as a buyer is on the other side.

Chief marketing officer Sarah McNabb told the outlet, 'It's almost like we have built the NASDAQ for the Creator Economy,' describing the fan proposition as 'Patreon on steroids.'

Chicago-based GigaStar runs a primary market, GigaStar Market, an SEC-registered crowdfunding portal where creators list a percentage of future YouTube ad revenue to fund equipment, staff and growth, with investors over 18 — many of them fans — buying in.

What makes the launch surprising is the regulatory ground GigaStar claims to have cleared alone.

According to Net Influencer, McNabb said the broker-dealer registration and digital alternative trading system approval took 'about two years' and 'roughly a million dollars in legal and compliance fees,' including sign-off from all 50 states, each with different requirements.

'You would think that things would be a little bit more digitized and modern working with the states. No,' she said.

Net Influencer reports she claims GigaStar is one of only 10 U.S. platforms cleared to trade digital asset securities and the only secondary market for creator revenue securities operated by an SEC-registered broker-dealer — a license set she calls 'a very strong first mover advantage.'

Trading still arrived about a month and a half late, a delay she attributed to getting compliance right.

The evidence so far is early-stage by Net Influencer's account: since the late-July soft launch, GigaStar Trading has handled about $130,000 in volume across more than 1,000 executed trades, with about 73% of traders returning, and — for reasons McNabb admits she cannot fully explain — Wednesdays are the biggest trading days of the week.

That sits on a larger primary base; Net Influencer cites a September announcement that GigaStar Market had registered more than 30,000 investor accounts and distributed more than $1.5 million in YouTube revenue to investors.

McNabb called the trading side 'a newborn, it's still small, still growing and still delicate,' and noted many fans refuse to sell tokens because they love the creator, treating them as buy-and-hold.

The most pressing fan question, she said, was simply how to cash out monthly USDC payouts into a bank account.

The open risk is liquidity: Net Influencer reports McNabb concedes 'there's no guarantee for the person who wants to sell to find a buyer on the secondary market,' calling that part of the risk of participating, and says GigaStar is bringing in a couple of outside market makers to help.

Disclosures cited by the outlet note investments are speculative, can be lost entirely, and must be held 12 months before trading.

Ahead, McNabb told Net Influencer she aims to 10x current data points and onboard 5,000 traders within 12 months, invite institutional traders as more securities clear the holding period, expand beyond YouTube ad revenue to TikTok and Instagram in six to 12 months, and eventually float 'exchange-traded funds for creators.'

Creators, meanwhile, earn a small quarterly technology fee each time their tokens trade — the same entrepreneurial build-your-own-business path TimesLIVE highlights in Lasizwe Dambuza, who marked ten years by winning YouTube Creator of the Year at the 4th annual South African Content Creator Awards and is growing his production company TD Media.