Whop’s 26-Year-Old Founder Has Created 650 Millionaires. His Next Goal: Make Money Worries Obsolete

Steven Schwartz wants work to feel like play. The 26-year-old chief executive of Whop says the future belongs to people who chase passions instead of paychecks. Money, in his view, should follow naturally from enjoyable effort. No dread. No drudgery. Just agency and income that arrives without friction.

So far his platform has delivered on part of that promise. Fortune reports Whop has produced more than 650 millionaires. Creators sell coaching programs, digital courses, private communities, software tools, even vitamins and meal kits. They keep the bulk of revenue. Some pull in seven figures a month. Others hit their first $20,000 payout and never look back. Ten to 15 users reach that milestone daily.

The numbers add up fast. Whop now supports roughly $4 billion in annual commerce across 145 countries. Monthly sales hover near $300 million. Twenty-two million people use the platform. Between 50,000 and 60,000 join each day. And the company itself stands at a $1.6 billion valuation after a $200 million investment from Tether in February 2026. Total funding reached about $272 million. Earlier rounds included a $17 million Series A led by Insight Partners in 2023, with participation from Peter Thiel and The Chainsmokers, plus a $55 million Series B led by Bain Capital Ventures.

Schwartz did not arrive at this vision by accident. He grew up moving between cities and countries. Military parents who practiced medicine meant constant change. He sold water on streets in China. He refereed hockey in Illinois. By his early teens he built and sold iOS apps that snagged limited-edition sneakers. That project, Sole Sniper, launched with Cameron Zoub, now Whop’s chief growth officer. They met as 13-year-olds in a Facebook group. The bots sold for $20 to $500. Frustration with fragmented tools and payments planted the seed for something bigger.

A college internship at Accenture in Singapore sharpened his technical skills. He coded chatbots for shipping firms. He could have stayed in corporate life. Instead he graduated from NYU Stern in 2021 and launched Whop with Zoub and chief technology officer Jack Sharkey. The platform began as a marketplace for sneaker bots. It quickly broadened. Today it hosts more than 200,000 sellers offering education, communities, agencies, software and physical goods. Physical sales alone generate $800,000 to $900,000 daily.

But Whop has evolved beyond a simple marketplace. In March 2026 it introduced a Treasury yield product. Users park earnings in a DeFi vault tied to Aave. Yields reach up to 6 percent APY with no lockups and instant withdrawals. Within a week of launch, 3 percent of users tried the beta feature without any marketing push. Forbes described the move as part of a larger ambition: turn Whop into a single place to earn, save, invest and spend. No more withdrawing to a bank, then hopping to crypto exchanges or ad platforms.

Schwartz explained the pain point clearly. “The normal course of business for these people is they’ll earn their money, they’ll withdraw it to their bank, and then they’ll immediately use that money and invest in Bitcoin, they’ll invest in stocks, they’ll run ads on Meta or TikTok. Who wants to wait for however many days that takes to re-onramp to all these other platforms?” The Tether partnership embeds stablecoin payments directly. Users can hold and transact in USDT without separate wallets. Schwartz added, “The average consumer doesn’t actually care about crypto as little as the crypto community wants to admit. They want their money fast and they want their money cheap.”

Success stories illustrate the model. Shelby Haas earns $1 million monthly teaching remote sales. Troy Adashun built a self-made fortune selling Alpha Lion Supplements. Podcast host Jay Shetty runs his certification school on the platform. Even unusual niches thrive. Video game map builders. Fortnite players who out-earn their parents. A Kenyan bus service processes rides through Whop. Two 14-year-olds run a profitable app agency.

The company’s own culture reflects Schwartz’s philosophy. Whop employs 120 full-time staff and hunts for 40 more roles in engineering, growth and design. It hired 16 people in May alone. Many large technology firms have slowed hiring. Whop accelerates. Yet scale brings challenges. “We’re just recruiting so many new people,” Schwartz said. “Now, I think as numbers go up, there’s a lot of added problems that come, and that a lot of times people think are very important relative to anything else. They’re not.”

Hiring screens for builders. Candidates must show they have created something impressive. Energy matters too. “The only thing that really matters is: has this person built something? Is it impressive and cool? And if so, then welcome to the team. We look at energy. How fun is it to be with this person? Do you find yourself wanting to spend a lot of time with them? That’s a good trait.” Creativity counts. End-to-end execution counts more. The office in Brooklyn reportedly encourages a shoes-off, relaxed atmosphere. Work hard. Play hard. The same ethos he wants to scale to millions of users.

Whop dropped its 30 percent marketplace fee in 2025. Revenue now comes from payments infrastructure, where the blended take rate sits around 5.5 percent. That stack handles categories with high chargebacks, such as trading signals or sports betting picks, that traditional processors often reject. The shift paid off. Schwartz envisions further integration. Direct spending of earnings on Meta and TikTok ads. Purchases of Bitcoin or tokenized stocks. The line between commerce and finance fades.

Critics might dismiss the vision as idealistic. Traditional employment still dominates for most. Yet the data shows momentum. Forty thousand businesses and individuals earn on Whop each month. Largest single payouts reach $1 million to $2 million. International users, many in places with limited banking options, gain immediate access to dollar-denominated yields. For them the product solves real constraints.

Schwartz’s own path reinforces the message. He started side hustles at 13. He built 22 more before Whop. Each taught him to spot fractured experiences and fix them. The sneaker bot frustration led to a centralized market. Payment friction led to in-house rails and stablecoins. Now the ambition widens. Sustainable income for billions. A world where passion and profit align so tightly that financial worry recedes.

Whether Whop can deliver that at global scale remains unproven. Competition from established marketplaces, payment giants and emerging fintech players will intensify. Regulatory questions around DeFi yields and stablecoins loom. Yet the early results command attention. Over 650 millionaires. Billions in volume. A valuation that doubled in under two years. And a founder who measures success not just by financial returns but by lives freed from uninspiring labor.

Schwartz put it simply in the recent Fortune profile. “The idea that people can have fun while working is very foreign to most people, but has been solved by some. We just want to bring it to the rest.” The platform’s trajectory suggests he is serious about trying.