Repricing Influence in Web3 (I): From Attention Arbitrage to Information Assets

In crypto, attention has always been expensive—but now it’s mispriced. What once signaled genuine community demand has become a metric easily gamed by bots, KOLs, and incentive loops. As token launches increasingly rely on pre-TGE hype and social rankings, the boundary between influence and capital has all but disappeared.

InfoFi emerges as a response to this distortion: protocols that score, tokenize, and trade attention itself. However, are these systems fixing the problem—or just building smarter ways to farm noise? CoinEx Research will dig out why the early wave of InfoFi is messy.

Beyond Eyeballs: Why Attention Alone Doesn’t Cut It Anymore

The Fallacy of "Eyeballs = Value" in Web3

Crypto projects, especially pre-TGE, treat attention as a proxy for future liquidity. However, the assumption that eyeballs translate to investment has created a highly inflationary attention loop, where projects buy short-term mindshare through KOL deals, airdrops, and social bounty programs—often without sustainable conversion.

Platforms like Kaito turned this into a structured pipeline: Yaps scores incentivize users to flood social media with content in exchange for speculative rewards (airdrops). Meanwhile, ranking-based incentives (e.g., Yaps leaderboards, Snaps leaderboards) push creators into soft-shill cycles, where the goal becomes visibility—not veracity.

source: Kaito

The Soft-Ponzi of Incentivized Hype Machines

Loud’s collapse is the clearest warning. Built entirely on trading fees redistributed to top attention earners, its Initial Attention Offering (IAO) system rewarded social posting without regard for quality. The result? A circular economy where users farm hype, not insight. Once trading slowed, the token crumbled—a textbook attention Ponzi.

source: Coinex Research

The same logic drives speculative cycles in pre-TGE ecosystems: attention farming becomes an arms race, where only the top creators(e.g., Top 100 Yappers) extract value, and the rest become unpaid amplifiers.

Why Attention ≠ Trust in the Crypto Age

In traditional media, attention leads to brand equity. In Web3, attention often leads to distortion. When every user is both speculator and marketer, the lines between content and marketing collapse. Without transparent curation, communities are left in an environment where attention can be manufactured, but trust cannot.

InfoFi Isn’t MediaFi: Information as On-chain Financial Instruments

From Content Incentives to Data Pricing Mechanisms

Most investors still view InfoFi as a repackaged "creator economy"—but that misses the point. InfoFi isn’t just rewarding posters; it’s financializing information flow itself. Platforms like Noise allow users to directly bet on “mindshare,” turning attention metrics into tradable instruments.

This is a major leap: the asset is no longer a token—it’s the collective perception around a project, priced via on-chain markets. By enabling users to long or short a project's social momentum, Noise decouples speculation from price charts and anchors it in narrative liquidity.

The Birth of a New Derivatives Market: Mindshare Swaps

Noise’s use of Kaito as a “mindshare oracle” introduces an entirely new class of prediction markets: instead of betting on token price, users bet on attention volume and velocity. It's akin to an options market for influence.

It also reveals a fragility: centralized oracles in decentralized markets. Kaito’s Yaps algorithm remains a black box—rife with potential manipulation, influence bias, and systemic opacity. When a single scoring engine determines market truth, the system risks becoming no better than the opaque credit rating agencies of TradFi.

From Curation to Liquidity: The Real Leap in InfoFi

The fundamental innovation of InfoFi is not content curation—it’s transforming soft signals into financial assets. In this framework, tweets become data points, reposts become liquidity indicators, and mindshare becomes collateral.

For investors, the shift is profound: the next alpha isn’t in buying tokens—it’s in understanding narrative volatility as a tradeable metric; For projects, influence is no longer an earned reputation; it’s an asset class to be managed, priced, and defended.

The Attention Ponzi: When Incentives Overwhelm Quality

How Gamified Influence Undermines Market Signal

In the rush to tokenize engagement, InfoFi platforms have introduced systems that unintentionally degrade the informational quality of attention. On Kaito, for instance, the Yaps system rewards content based on an opaque mix of frequency, virality, and semantic relevance. But with scoring algorithms unrevealed and attention caps concentrated at the top, what emerges isn’t a meritocracy—it’s an algorithmic oligarchy.

Projects exploit this by front-loading incentives (airdrop points, leaderboard perks) to generate content bursts. The outcome is an arms race of manufactured virality, where low-quality shill threads outpace long-form, high-signal research.

From Signal to Saturation: The Rise of Information Deserts

Kaito’s “Mindshare Arena” now heavily influences pre-TGE project visibility, shaping both public perception and investor behavior. But as KOLs churn content to climb the leaderboard, the platform becomes saturated with promotional noise, drowning out dissent, critical analysis, and unaligned voices.

Ironically, the more success Kaito achieves, the harder it becomes for real insight to survive. This is the InfoFi variant of Gresham’s Law: bad content drives out good when incentives are misaligned.

The Unintended Consequence: Centralized Algorithmic Gatekeeping

InfoFi claims to be a decentralized alternative to legacy media, yet many projects retain centralized scoring engines and opaque data pipelines. When content visibility, reputational scores, and token rewards are all mediated by a proprietary model, platforms risk replicating the same top-down control Web3 set out to escape.

Kaito’s black-box model, Loud’s IAO whitelist scoring, and Cookie’s Snaps ranking system all reflect a core tension: can attention be decentralized if its pricing remains proprietary?

The Repricing Has Started: Who Really Owns Influence?

From KOL Fatigue to Reputation Arbitrage

The InfoFi boom is revealing a hard truth: most of Web3’s visible influence is poorly priced and poorly distributed. Projects like Wallchain and bam.fun are trying to change that by tying creator rewards to metrics like X Score or Final Impact, integrating variables like follower quality, semantic alignment, and trust circles.

This marks a shift from “raw engagement” to influence accounting—but the game is still early. Who sets the rules? Who audits the scores?

Algorithmic Power = Protocol Power

As platforms like Kaito and Cookie gain traction, their proprietary scoring engines become gatekeepers of visibility and capital. Yet few users understand how scores are generated, and even fewer can challenge them.

When your Yaps score determines your airdrop eligibility or your inclusion in Connect campaigns, algorithms become quasi-financial regulators—but without the transparency or accountability of a DAO.

Pricing ≠ Understanding

Scoring attention is not the same as understanding its value. InfoFi platforms risk confusing metrics with meaning, and visibility with trustworthiness.

True influence isn’t about reach—it’s about consequence. The ability to shift minds, spark inquiry, or expose truth cannot be fully captured in a score. And yet, the ecosystem relies on these scores to allocate capital.

The problem isn’t that we price attention. It’s that we do so without asking whether those prices reflect anything worth paying for.

Conclusion: From Attention to Reputation—The Next Asset Class in Crypto

InfoFi isn't just tracking attention—it’s redefining how crypto values perception, trust, and visibility. However, the early wave is messy: black-box scoring, shallow incentives, and algorithmic gatekeeping dominate.

What comes next is more important: can attention markets become decentralized, auditable, and meaningful?

In Part II, CoinEx Research examines the monetization layer—how protocols like Kaito, Noise, and Cookie are financializing influence, where they’re failing, and what’s required to make InfoFi real infrastructure for Web3.