InfoFi
This report introduces the notable players in the Yap-to-Earn, Attention Market, and Reputation Market categories of InfoFi, as well as discusses the significance and challenges of InfoFi’s development.
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Executive Summary
- InfoFi, which combines Information and Finance, is an emerging crypto narrative that transforms information and attention into tradeable, monetisable assets. It leverages AI to digest information while using blockchain tokenisation and transparency to align incentives and provide trading capabilities.
- The InfoFi market can be grouped by the following categories: Prediction Market, Yap-to-Earn, Data Analytics and Insights, Attention Market, Reputation Market, and Paid Content.
- Yap-to-Earn: Kaito is one of the pioneers of InfoFi, tokenising attention in the form of Yaps. Creators can earn Yaps based on their contribution to discussions on Crypto Twitter (CT), which are in turn used in rankings on the Yapper Leaderboard. Projects can set the reward criteria based on their goals to reward top and loyal Yappers.
- Data Analytics and Insights: ElfaAI tracks and analyses traders, influencers, and other news sources to identify potential investment opportunities. Users can also share insights, discuss trends, and even trade cryptocurrencies directly within the ElfaAI app.
- Attention Market: Noise enables users to trade and speculate on mindshare or project attention. It decouples trades from token price and lets the community trade projects without tokens.
- Reputation Market: Ethos introduces a ‘Credibility Score’ mechanism to let users evaluate and vouch for crypto projects and influencers through peer reviews and staking.
- InfoFi enables creators to turn insights and engagements into value, while allowing projects to identify their loyal users. Additionally, it emphasises decentralisation and transparency with rankings and rewards reflected on-chain for efficient evaluation of crypto projects. However, biases still exist when AI models judge content quality and influence. Mindshare as a metric may also lack sustainability, encouraging content spam or visibility over value (quantity over quality).
- InfoFi represents an intersection of AI, creator engagement, and blockchain-based capital formation. It shifts content consumption from a passive, one-way flow into a system where value is distributed across stakeholders. However, InfoFi is still in its early stages. Attention can be short-lived, so clear measures are needed to ascertain quality and foster long-term retention.
1. Introduction
InfoFi, which combines Information and Finance, is an emerging crypto narrative that transforms information and attention into tradeable, monetisable assets. It leverages AI to digest information on a large scale while using blockchain technologies to align incentives and enable trading.
The concept of attention economics was initially proposed in 1971 by psychologist and economist Herbert A. Simon, who discussed the limitation of attention in a world saturated with information. Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) on YouTube, TikTok, and other platforms compete to gain public attention, while most of the revenue flows to Web2 platforms. Yet the main attention contributors — users, creators, and fans — received little to no benefit. The short video market is growing rapidly and is projected to reach US$3.24 billion by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.2% between 2023 and 2030.
Prediction markets are a key example of InfoFi that gained traction in Web3, driven largely by the 2024 US presidential election. Platforms like Polymarket enabled users to speculate on trending events, offering an indication of community sentiment.
InfoFi leverages blockchain technology, oracles, and tokenised incentives to create decentralised marketplaces where information can be traded transparently and securely. This innovative approach positions information as a tangible economic asset in the decentralised digital economy, and participation in the information value chain (e.g., information discovery and building credibility) is democratised as it is now market-driven.
The InfoFi market can be grouped by the following categories that monetise different aspects of information:
| Type | Description | Examples |
| Prediction Market | Enables speculation on the results of diverse topics ranging from politics and sports to macro events | Polymarket, Azuro |
| Yap-to-Earn | Earn rewards by sharing insights and contentThe core concept is to encourage creators to post high-quality, crypto-related posts or comments on social platforms. AI algorithms then assess them based on the quantity, quality, interaction, and depth, and distribute points or token rewards accordingly. | Kaito, Cookie.fun, Galxe |
| Data Analytics and Insights | Provides market insights through on-chain analytics and trend/sentiment analysis Data analysis is often AI-driven | ElfaAI, Arkham |
| Attention Market | Enables ranking based on attention or mindshare Provides a marketplace or incentives for creators to monetise their information | Noise, Loud |
| Reputation Market | Enables evaluation of creators or projects based on a credibility score or reputation-based system on-chain | Ethos, Giverep |
| Paid Content | Offer token-gated content that only paid users who bought keys can access | Backroom |
We published reports for prediction markets and content monetisation in SocialFi before. This report will introduce players in the other categories, as well as discuss the significance and challenges of InfoFi’s development.
2. Notable Players
2.1 Kaito
Kaito is one of the pioneers of InfoFi, with products spanning across data discovery and analytics, as well as attention markets.
Kaito Pro
Kaito Pro is the protocol’s flagship product, providing a real-time search engine and market intelligence platform in the crypto industry that uses AI models to source information across social media, governance forums, and podcasts.
It is currently available with a subscription plan, helping advanced users, traders, and enterprises search for any ticker, topic, or trend and get insights in seconds. The platform also tracks shifts in market sentiment, token, or narrative mindshare to help users make decisions. Mindshare, or share of mind, is a term popularised by Kaito in crypto, which means users’ awareness or popularity surrounding a particular subject.
Yaps: Tokenised Attention
Kaito tokenises attention, which is represented by Yaps (similar to the concept of points). Instead of purely relying on common social media metrics such as likes and comments, Kaito established its own AI algorithm to track social graphs and semantics to rank attention captured by creators. Yaps’s data (e.g., X account’s username and Yaps’s score) is available on-chain, powered by Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) on the Base blockchain. It is fully composable and permissionless, allowing anyone to integrate it into on-chain applications and protocols.
Creators, or Yappers, are able to earn Yaps based on their contribution to crypto discussions on CT. While the detailed algorithm is not disclosed, the earning criteria centers around:
- Proof of Work: Volume of relevant content
- Proof of Exchange: Engagement and interactions received on the post, especially from accounts that also hold Yap points
- Proof of Insight: Originality, depth, and relevance of discussions
Although Yaps are not directly tradeable, they represent a means to rank creators’ contributions to a project which can lead to various on-chain rewards. At the time of writing, Kaito has more than 200,000 monthly active Yappers on the platform.
Kaito Connect — Connect Users and Projects
Kaito Connect is Kaito’s InfoFi network, which creates a marketplace for attention and mindshare to be ranked and rewarded through its Yapper leaderboard and Yapper launchpad. Kaito leverages blockchain’s characteristics to reflect rankings of crypto projects in real-time and distribute rewards transparently.
The Yapper Leaderboard is a public dashboard ranking creator contributions for specific projects. These include pre-token generation event (TGE) projects, post-TGE, and Crypto x AI. Individual creators and accounts are ranked according to mindshare, which measures the share of attention that an individual contributes to the project through posting and engagement on CT. Projects can set the reward criteria based on their goals, and rewards are often distributed to top and loyal Yappers.
Another utility of Yaps is on the Yapper Launchpad, which allows Yappers to vote on pre-TGE projects launching on the Yapper Leaderboard. Yappers’ votes account for 25%, while Kaito holders (including KAITO and Genesis NFT holders) account for 75%. This represents a fairer way for the community to decide on projects that deserve market attention.
Through these mechanisms, Kaito’s InfoFi network benefits multiple stakeholders:
- Attention Creators: Demonstrate their contributions and loyalty to a project and receive payouts and recognition
- Users: Identify top creators or high-quality content for a specific project
- Projects: Creates a strategy to encourage public participation to discuss their project, and serves as a way to identify and reward key content creators who drive attention
Rewards Distribution and Significance
Once attention and influence can be quantified, projects can better track and reward Yappers. Rewards Station is the place to show a project’s proposed reward plans.
Yaps are an important criterion to determine potential reward distribution, which comes in the form of:
- Weekly sKAITO (a staked and wrapped version of KAITO) distributions which reward the top 50 Yappers and emerging Yappers
- Higher ranking on the Yapper Leaderboard, which may translate to higher potential for qualification for those projects’ airdrops
- Potential Kaito ecosystem airdrops
Since its launch, Kaito has distributed more than $95 million in rewards (excluding its own airdrop) through project affiliations. Top examples include Boop, a Solana-based memecoin launchpad that leveraged Kaito’s social algorithm to identify and reward top Solana and meme coin Yappers through its airdrop. Eigenlayer, Berachain, and Story Protocol also distributed parts of their token airdrop to Kaito holders and Yappers. Leveraging Kaito’s analytics and InfoFi network, these protocols are able to identify the content creators that contribute to their protocols and reward them accordingly.
2.2 ElfaAI
ElfaAI is an AI-powered market intelligence and sentiment analytics platform that tracks and analyses over 10,000 traders, influencers, and other news sources to help users identify potential investment opportunities and discover new projects. It is currently on an invite-only basis. The protocol is designed to extract actionable insights from the overwhelming volume of on-chain and off-chain data, empowering traders and investors to catch early trends and short-term ‘alpha’ opportunities.
Similar to Kaito, it uses the concept of mindshare to rank tokens and projects. However, ElfaAI takes a trading-first approach, offering a live feed that summarises the latest token- or project-specific news. Additionally, the token price chart also lets users see which influencer said what and when, making it easier to track how price movements correlate with social media posts.
Users can also share insights, discuss trends, and even trade cryptocurrencies directly within the ElfaAI app, fostering a collaborative environment for information sharing and decision-making.
2.3 Noise
Noise is an attention protocol that enables users to trade and speculate on mindshare or project attention trends, rather than traditional tokens or price movements. The project has been live on the MegaETH testnet since March 2025, and allows for direct trading of crypto mindshare. It uses Kaito as an oracle to get a project’s mindshare data, and enables users to take a position of up to 5x leverage based on mindshare fluctuations.
Generally to trade a project, users have to directly purchase the token and speculate on its price, which can be impacted by factors including token unlocks or market-making. Noise decouples trades from token price and provides another metric for users to trade on. Noise is currently in invite-only mode, and users can trade on selected listings, including pump.fun, OpenSea, and Monad.
2.4 Ethos
Ethos is an on-chain credibility platform tackling the lack of evaluation standards in Web3 by offering a unified crypto credibility scoring system.
Decentralised Credibility Scoring System
Ethos introduces a ‘Credibility Score’ mechanism, allowing users to evaluate and vouch for crypto projects, KOLs, and other participants. These scores are generated through a combination of peer reviews and staking, ensuring that reputation is both community-driven and financially backed. The protocol regularly updates its reputation scoring algorithm to adapt to evolving behaviors and ensure the accuracy and fairness of scores.
Ethos enables users to leave reviews (positive, neutral, or negative) for others. Additionally, users can vouch for their ETH (similar to staking) in an Ethos profile or a wallet address to represent their magnitude of trust. Slashing allows users to report unethical behaviour or inaccurate claims. Ethos has accumulated nearly 12,000 profiles created and 890 ETH vouched at the time of writing.
Peer-to-Peer Review and Guarantee
Users can cross-evaluate each other and provide guarantees, making the system resistant to manipulation and Sybil attacks. This peer-based approach helps surface trustworthy actors and flag potential risks or scams in real time.
Reputation Market
Ethos launched a reputation market where trust itself becomes a tradeable asset. Users trade by staking on the credibility of others, creating a new layer of market-driven accountability in Web3.
Transparency and Integration
All reviews, guarantees, and credibility scores are recorded on-chain, ensuring transparency, immutability, and resistance to censorship or tampering. Ethos is designed to integrate with various decentralised applications (dapps), wallets, and platforms, making its reputation data widely accessible and composable within the broader Web3 ecosystem.
3. Significance and Concerns
The InfoFi (Information Finance) market is rapidly emerging as a pivotal sector within the crypto industry, offering new ways to access, analyse, and act on both on-chain and off-chain financial data. Below are the significant aspects and risks associated with this evolving market.
For Yap-to-Earn, Data Analytics and Insights Protocols
| Aspect | Significance |
| Value Creation (For Yap-to-Earn) | Creators turn their insights and engagement into value, beyond likes and comments on social mediaProjects use these insights to track their brand awareness and loyal users |
| Decentralisation and Transparency | Compared to oblique algorithms adopted by centralised platforms, InfoFi relies on information provided by the community and aims to reward attention fairlyRankings are generally reflected in real-time and rewards are recorded on-chain, which makes them transparent and verifiable |
| Efficiency | Reduce fragmentation in crypto market information by consolidating insights (e.g., prediction markets that can provide a more accurate reflection of sentiments)Provides a relatively efficient way to evaluate crypto projects and influencers using leaderboards and metrics, including mindshare, instead of relying solely on token price |
| Aspect | Concerns |
| Reward Concentration(For Yap-to-Earn) | High-reach creators may reap most of the rewards because of their existing engagement and followers Bias still exists when using only AI models to judge a content’s quality and influence, which impacts creators’ rankings |
| Mindshare Sustainability | Akin to the hype of points farming, creators may be drawn to promote a project because of the rewards offered, and mindshare may drop without further economic incentives For example, Stay Loud (LOUD), an initiative built on Kaito, distributes rewards to the top 25 mindshare contributors weekly. LOUD captured up to 70% mindshare on Kaito’s leaderboard in May 2025, but lost 95% of its value from its all-time high since its debut in June. |
| Data Manipulation and Uncertain Data Quality | May encourage content spam or visibility (quantity) over value (quality)Posts with high engagement may not reflect accuracy and content qualityPotentially alter content creators’ behaviour, for example, using ‘follow-for-follow’ tactics to inflate mindshare metrics. Creators may even share their earnings with users to encourage engagement.Bots are used to farm rewards |
The crypto community will need to work out the criteria to judge content quality, for example, using AI to review and manage content. Kaito’s and CookieDAO’s project leaderboards also enable teams to set criteria based on their objectives. For example, some projects may value exposure or reach, while others may value insightful discussions around products, which can help to measure mindshare in different ways.
For Attention Protocols
| Aspect | Significance |
| New Ways of Trading and Signalling Conviction | A new way for users to support projects and trade based on attention or mindshare, instead of using the token price which can be impacted by token unlocks and insider selling eventsOpens up trading for projects without tokens |
| Early Signals of Market Trends | Potentially signal what the community finds important to allow early detection of trends |
| Concerns | |
| Mindshare Manipulation | Similar to token prices, mindshare can also potentially be manipulated through spam or promoting superficial social media content Projects with high mindshare do not always translate to long-term value, and may simply reflect short-term hype. Conversely, projects with low mindshare may not equate to a lack of value. |
For Reputation Protocols
| Aspect | Significance |
| Enables Decentralised Trust | Enable users to identify which individuals or projects to trust or avoid in an information-abundant worldScores and reputation are earned based on the community instead of centralised algorithms |
| Aspect | Concerns |
| Reputation Manipulation | As credibility scores become more important, it may encourage users to change their behaviour to optimise their scores or engage in deceptive practices to undermine others’ scores |
4. Conclusion
InfoFi represents an emerging business model in today’s attention economy — it is one where AI’s capabilities, creator engagement, and blockchain-based capital formation converge. It shifts content consumption from a passive, one-way flow into a system where value is distributed across stakeholders. Additionally, TradFi players are also starting to see the value of market-driven knowledge, such as the integration of Polymarket’s US elections data into Bloomberg Terminal.
For creators, InfoFi enables meaningful value creation and monetisation opportunities. It also becomes a way for brands to track their brand sentiment and improve the way they spend their marketing dollars. To the crypto market, it creates user-generated insights for the crypto community and unlocks opportunities for everyone to earn through trading mindshare or becoming a content creator.
However, InfoFi is still in its early stages. Attention can be fleeting, and there needs to be measures to ascertain content and product quality. Additionally, not all financial or economic parts are integrated into the current InfoFi platforms. For instance, Kaito captures attention and mindshare but lacks the mechanism to convert this into financial value. Yaps encourages higher-quality content, yet the model may be unsustainable without measurable incentives for the said quality. This is an area where the market should pay attention to in the future in terms of potential areas for further development.
As InfoFi evolves, bridging attention with sustainable value will be key to its long-term success.
Read the full report: InfoFi
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Crypto.com Research and Insights team
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