InfoFi: A New Form of Attention Economy

In 1971, psychologist and economist Herbert Simon first proposed the theory of attention economy, pointing out that in a world of information overload, human attention has become the scarcest resource.

Economist and USV Managing Partner Albert Wenger further reveals a fundamental shift in "The World After Capital": human civilization is undergoing a third leap - from the "capital scarcity" of the industrial age to the "attention scarcity" of the knowledge era.

• Agricultural Revolution: Aimed at solving food scarcity issues, but spurred land disputes;
• Industrial Revolution: Aimed at addressing the issue of land scarcity, but shifted towards resource competition and capital accumulation;
• Digital Revolution: Competing for Attention.

The underlying driving force of this transformation comes from two major characteristics of digital technology: the zero marginal cost of information replication and dissemination, and the universality of AI computation(, but human attention is not replicable).

Whether it's Labubu's popularity in the潮玩 market or the live streaming sales by top influencers, it essentially reflects a significant competition for the attention of users and viewers. However, in the traditional attention economy, users, fans, and consumers serve as "data fuel" contributing their attention, while the excess profits are monopolized by platforms and scalpers. The InfoFi of the Web3 world attempts to disrupt this model—through blockchain, token incentives, and AI technology, it aims to make the processes of information production, dissemination, and consumption transparent, striving to return value to the participants.

This article will provide an in-depth introduction to the categorization of the InfoFi project, the challenges it faces, and future development trends.

What is InfoFi?

InfoFi is a fusion of Information + Finance, with the core focus on transforming difficult-to-quantify, abstract information into dynamic, quantifiable value carriers. This encompasses not only traditional prediction markets but also the distribution, speculation, or trading of information or abstract concepts such as attention, reputation, on-chain data or intelligence, personal insights, and narrative activity.

The core advantages of InfoFi are reflected in:

• Value Redistribution Mechanism: Returns the value monopolized by platforms in the traditional attention economy to the true contributors. Through smart contracts and incentive mechanisms, enables information producers, disseminators, and consumers to share the rewards.
• Information Valuation Capability: Transforming abstract attention, insights, reputation, narrative activity, etc. into tradable digital assets, creating a trading market for the value of information that is originally difficult to circulate.
• Low barrier to entry: Users can participate in value distribution through content creation simply with their social media accounts.
• Innovation of incentive mechanisms: not only rewarding content creation, but also including dissemination, interaction, verification, and other links, allowing niche content and long-tail users to also receive rewards. High-quality content receives more rewards, encouraging the continuous production of high-quality information;
• Cross-domain application potential: For example, the introduction of AI provides InfoFi with advantages such as content quality assessment and market optimization predictions.

InfoFi Classification

InfoFi covers a variety of different application scenarios and models, which can be mainly divided into the following categories:

prediction market

Prediction markets, as a core component of InfoFi, are mechanisms that use collective intelligence to predict the outcomes of future events. Participants express their expectations for future events, such as elections or policy outcomes, sports events, economic forecasts, price expectations, product release dates, etc., by buying and selling "shares" linked to specific event outcomes (. The market prices reflect the collective expectations of the crowd regarding the event outcomes.

In the framework of InfoFi, prediction markets are not just tools for speculation, but platforms that uncover and reveal real information through financial incentive mechanisms. This mechanism leverages market efficiency, encouraging participants to provide accurate information, as correct predictions yield economic rewards, while incorrect predictions may lead to losses.

The representative platforms of prediction markets include:

• Polymarket: The largest decentralized prediction market, Polymarket is built on the Polygon network and uses USDC stablecoin as the trading medium. Users can make predictions on events such as political elections, economic outcomes, entertainment, and product launches.

• Kalshi: is a fully CFTC-regulated prediction market platform in the United States, supporting deposits in USDC, BTC, WLD, SOL, XRP, and RLUSD through a partnership with cryptocurrency and stablecoin infrastructure provider Zero Hash, but settles in fiat currency. Kalshi focuses on event contracts )Event Contracts(, allowing users to trade outcomes of political, economic, and financial events. Due to regulatory compliance, Kalshi has a unique advantage in the U.S. market.

) Mouth Lick Type InfoFi ### Yap-to-Earn (

"Yap-to-Earn" is a colloquial term used in the Chinese crypto community, referring to earning rewards by expressing opinions and sharing content. The core idea of Yap-to-Earn is to encourage users to post high-quality, crypto-related posts or comments on social platforms, which are mostly evaluated by AI algorithms based on the quantity, quality, interaction, and depth of the content, thus allocating points or token rewards. This model differs from traditional on-chain activities like trading or staking, focusing more on users' information contributions and influence within the community.

Characteristics of "Zui Lu":

• No on-chain transactions or high capital required, just a social account is needed to participate.
• Enhance project community engagement by rewarding valuable discussions.
• AI algorithms reduce human intervention, filter out bots and low-quality content, ensuring a more transparent reward distribution.
• Points may be converted into token airdrops or ecological privileges, early participants may receive higher returns.

Current mainstream mouth-focused projects or projects supporting mouth focus include:

Kaito AI is the representative platform for Yap-to-Earn, which has collaborated with multiple projects to assess the quantity, quality, interactivity, and depth of cryptocurrency-related content published by users on social platforms through AI algorithms, rewarding Yap points for users to compete for token airdrops on the leaderboard.

In this way, creators can not only effectively prove their influence and content value through Yaps, but also attract precise high-quality attention; ordinary users can efficiently discover quality content and KOLs with the help of the Yaps system; while project parties achieve the dual goals of precisely reaching target users and expanding brand influence, forming a virtuous ecological cycle of mutual benefits for multiple parties.

Cookie.fun: Cookie tracking AI agents' mindshare ), interaction status, and on-chain data, generating a comprehensive market overview, while also tracking the mindshare and sentiment of crypto projects. Cookie Snaps has a built-in rewards and airdrop activity system, providing rewards to Cookie creators who contribute to project attention.

Virtuals: Virtuals is not a platform focused on Yap-to-Earn, but rather an AI agent launch platform. However, in mid-April, a new launch mechanism called Genesis Launch was introduced on Base. One of the ways to earn the points required to participate in the launch includes Yap-to-Earn( supported by Kaito).

Loud: As an "Attention Value Experiment" within the Kaito AI ecosystem, Loud occupied over 70% of the Kaito attention leaderboard through the Yap-to-Earn activity before the official token release via the Initial Attention Offering ( at the end of May 2025. The LOUD operating mechanism also revolves around the "Attention Economy", where transaction fees collected after trading are primarily distributed in SOL to the top 25 users on the attention leaderboard.

Wallchain Quacks: Wallchain is a programmatic AttentionFi project based on Solana, supported by AllianceDAO. Wallchain X Score evaluates the overall influence of users, while Wallchain Quacks rewards high-quality content and valuable interactions. Currently, the Wallchain Quacks customized LLM evaluates creators' content daily, and valuable, insightful content creators will receive Quacks rewards.

) Mouth Lick + Task/On-chain Activities/Verification: Multi-dimensional Contribution Value Realization

Some projects also evaluate users' multidimensional contributions by combining content contributions with on-chain activities such as transactions, staking, NFT minting, or tasks.

Galxe Starboard: Galxe is a Web3 growth platform, and its latest release, Galxe Starboard, is dedicated to rewarding real contributions in off-chain and on-chain actions. Projects can define multiple contribution tiers; what matters is not just how much content is posted, but the value it brings to the entire project, including post engagement, sentiment, virality, interaction with dApps, holding tokens, minting NFTs, or completing on-chain tasks.

Mirra: Mirra is a decentralized AI model trained on community-curated data that can learn from the real-time contributions of Web3 users. Specifically, creators publish high-quality content on social platforms, equivalent to submitting AI validation data; scouts (Scout) identify high-value content on the platform and mark it in replies with @MirraTerminal to submit insights, determining which content the AI learns from, helping to shape intelligent AI.

( Reputation InfoFi

Ethos is an on-chain reputation protocol that is entirely based on open protocols and on-chain records, combined with social proof of stake ) Social PoS ###. It generates a credibility score ( Credibility Score ) through decentralized mechanisms to ensure the reliability, decentralization, and Sybil resistance of its reputation system. Currently, Ethos operates under a strict invitation system. The core function of Ethos is to generate a credibility score, a quantifiable metric of user trust on the chain. The score is based on the following on-chain activities and social interactions: a comment mechanism ( with cumulative utility ), a guarantee mechanism ### staking Ethereum to endorse other users (.

Ethos also launched a reputation market, allowing users to speculate on the reputation of individuals, companies, DAOs, and even AI entities by buying and selling "trust votes" and "distrust votes," essentially going long or short on reputation.

GiveRep: Primarily built on Sui, it aims to convert users' social influence and community participation into quantifiable on-chain reputation through their activities on social platforms, and incentivizes user participation through rewards. Commenting and tagging the official GiveRep account under a creator's post allows both the commenter and the creator to earn one reputation point each. To limit abuse, GiveRep restricts this commenting action to no more than 3 times per day per user, including 3 times ), while creators can receive unlimited points daily. Comments from Sui ecosystem projects and ambassadors will earn more points.

( Attention Market/Forecast

Noise: is a trend discovery and trading platform based on MegaETH, currently requiring an invitation code for access. Users can go long or short on the project's attention.

Upside: Upside is a social prediction market that rewards the discovery, sharing, and prediction of valuable content and links, creating a dynamic market through a liking mechanism. Earnings are distributed proportionally to voters, creators, and curators. To prevent manipulation of the prediction pool, the weight of likes is reduced in the last 5 minutes of each round.

YAPYO: An attention market infrastructure of a certain ecosystem. YAPYO indicates that the rewards in its coordination mechanism are not just profits, but also lasting influence.

Trends: Social posts can be tokenized, becoming a trend on the joint curve called "Trend it". Creators are eligible to receive 20% of the joint curve trading fees for each trend.

) Token gated content access: filtering noise

Backroom: Creators can launch tokenized spaces, providing curated content such as market insights, Alpha, and analysis without management or social pressure; users can unlock low-noise, high-value information by purchasing the on-chain Key associated with each creator's space. Keys are not just for access—they are tradable assets with dynamically priced curves driven by demand. At the same time, AI will process chat data and signals into actionable insights.

Xeet: A new protocol on the Abstract network that has not been fully launched yet, but a referral program has already been introduced, inviting KOLs to earn reward points. The founder of Xeet mocked that InfoFi has evolved into NoiseFi.