InfoFi: A New Era of Attention Market Empowered by AI

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

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

• Agricultural Revolution: Aimed at solving food scarcity issues, but gave rise to land disputes;
• Industrial Revolution: Aimed at solving the problem of land scarcity, but turned to resource competition and capital accumulation;
• Digital Revolution: Competing for Attention.

The underlying driving force behind this transformation stems from two key characteristics of digital technology: the zero marginal cost of information replication and dissemination, and the universality of AI computation (although human attention cannot be replicated).

Whether it's the booming潮玩 market or the live streaming sales by top influencers, it essentially revolves around the competition for users' and viewers' attention. However, in the traditional attention economy, users, fans, and consumers contribute attention as "data fuel", while the excess profits are monopolized by platforms and others. The InfoFi of the Web3 world attempts to disrupt this model—using blockchain, token incentives, and AI technology to make the production, dissemination, and consumption of information transparent, aiming to return value to the participants.

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

What is InfoFi?

InfoFi is a combination of Information + Finance, with the core focus on transforming difficult-to-quantify and abstract information into dynamic and 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 that is monopolized by platforms in the traditional attention economy back to the true contributors. Through smart contracts and incentive mechanisms, allows information producers, disseminators, and consumers to share the benefits.
• Information Valuation Capability: Transforming abstract aspects such as attention, insights, reputation, and narrative activity into tradable digital assets, creating a trading market for the intrinsic value of information that is otherwise difficult to circulate.
• Low threshold participation: Users can participate in value distribution through content creation simply by using their social media accounts.
• Innovation of incentive mechanisms: not only rewards content creation but also includes multiple aspects such as dissemination, interaction, and verification, 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 advantages for InfoFi in content quality assessment, market prediction optimization, and more.

InfoFi Classification

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

prediction market

Prediction markets, as a core component of InfoFi, are a mechanism for forecasting future event outcomes through collective intelligence. Participants express their expectations for future events (such as election or policy outcomes, sports events, economic forecasts, price expectations, product release dates, etc.) by buying and selling "shares" linked to specific event outcomes, and the market price reflects the collective expectations of the crowd regarding the event outcomes. A certain trading platform is a representative application promoting the InfoFi concept.

Within the framework of InfoFi, prediction markets are not merely tools for speculation, but platforms for uncovering and revealing 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 result in losses.

Representative platforms for prediction markets include:

• A trading platform: the largest decentralized prediction market built on the Polygon network, using USDC stablecoin as the medium of exchange. Users can predict events such as political elections, economics, entertainment, and product launches.
• Certain platform: It is a prediction market platform fully regulated by the CFTC in the United States, supporting deposits in USDC, BTC, and other cryptocurrencies and stablecoins through partnerships with infrastructure providers, but settled in fiat currency. The platform focuses on event contracts, allowing users to trade on the outcomes of political, economic, and financial events. Due to regulatory compliance, it has a unique advantage in the U.S. market.

Mouth Lick Type InfoFi (Yap-to-Earn)

"Zui Lu" is a humorous term used in the Chinese crypto community for Yap-to-Earn, which refers to earning rewards by sharing insights and content. The core concept of Yap-to-Earn is to encourage users to post high-quality, crypto-related posts or comments on social platforms, mostly evaluated by AI algorithms based on the quantity, quality, engagement, and depth of the content, thereby distributing points or token rewards. This model differs from traditional on-chain activities (such as trading or staking), focusing more on users' contributions and influence within the community.

Features of "Zui Lu":

• No on-chain transactions or large capital required, just a social account is needed to participate.
• Enhance the activity of the project community 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, and early participants may receive higher returns.

Current mainstream mouthful projects or projects that support mouthful include:

A certain AI platform: It is the representative platform for Yap-to-Earn, having collaborated with multiple projects to assess the quantity, quality, interactivity, and depth of users' crypto-related content posted on social media through AI algorithms, rewarding Yap points for users to compete on leaderboards to earn token airdrops.

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 high-quality content and KOLs through the Yaps system; while project parties achieve the dual goals of accurately reaching target users and expanding brand influence, forming a positive ecological cycle of win-win for multiple parties.

An AI platform has distributed tokens worth over $90 million to various communities, with more than 200,000 active Yappers monthly.

A certain platform: Tracks the mind share, interaction status, and on-chain data of AI agents to generate a comprehensive market overview, as well as tracking the mind share and sentiment of cryptocurrency projects. It features a built-in rewards and airdrop activity system to reward creators who contribute to the project's attention.

The platform has collaborated with three projects to launch activities, namely Spark, Sapien, and OpenLedger. Among them, the number of participants in the Spark activity exceeded 16,000, while the participation numbers for the latter two projects were 7,930 and 6,810 respectively.

A certain virtual platform: it is not a platform focused on Yap-to-Earn itself, but rather an AI agent launch platform. However, in mid-April, it launched a new launch mechanism called Genesis Launch on Base, and one of the ways to earn points to participate in the launch includes Yap-to-Earn.

A certain attention project: As a "attention value experiment" within a certain AI platform ecosystem, it once occupied over 70% of the attention leaderboard of the AI platform through Yap-to-Earn activities before officially launching the token via initial attention issuance at the end of May 2025. The operational mechanism of the project also revolves around the "attention economy", with transaction fees collected after trading launched primarily distributed to the top 25 users on the attention leaderboard.

A certain blockchain project: It is a programmatic AttentionFi project based on Solana, supported by AllianceDAO. The project assesses the overall influence of users and rewards high-quality content and valuable interactions. Currently, the project's custom LLM evaluates creator content daily, and content creators who produce valuable and insightful content will be rewarded.

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

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

A certain Web3 platform: is a Web3 growth platform that has recently launched features aimed at rewarding real contributions in off-chain and on-chain actions. Projects can define multiple layers of contribution, where what's important is not just how many tweets were sent, but the value brought to the entire project, including post engagement, sentiment, viral spread, interaction with dApps, holding tokens, minting NFTs, or completing on-chain tasks.

A certain AI platform: It is a decentralized AI model trained on community-selected data, capable of learning from the real-time contributions of Web3 users. Specifically, creators publish high-quality content on social media, which amounts to submitting AI verification data; scouts identify high-value content and submit insights, determining what content the AI learns from, helping to shape intelligent AI.

Reputation InfoFi

Reputation Protocol: It is an on-chain reputation protocol that is entirely based on open protocols and on-chain records, combined with social proof of rights. It generates credibility scores through a decentralized mechanism, ensuring the reliability, decentralization, and Sybil attack resistance of its reputation system. Currently, it adopts a strict invitation system. The core function is to generate credibility scores, a quantifiable indicator of users' on-chain trustworthiness. The scores are based on on-chain activities and social interactions: a commenting mechanism (with cumulative utility) and a guarantee mechanism (staking Ethereum to endorse other users).

The protocol also launched a reputation market that allows 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.

A certain reputation project: mainly built on Sui, aims to convert users' social influence and community participation on social platforms into quantifiable on-chain reputation through their activities, and incentivizes user participation through rewards. Commenting and tagging the official account below the creator's post allows both the commenter and the creator to earn one reputation point each. To limit abuse, this type of comment mention by users is restricted to 3 times per day (including 3 times), while creators can receive unlimited points daily. Comments from Sui ecosystem projects and ambassadors will earn more points.

Attention Market / Prediction

A certain trend platform: It 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 attention of projects.

A certain prediction platform: it 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.

A certain attention project: the infrastructure of an attention market within a certain ecosystem. The project states that the rewards in its coordination mechanism are not just profits, but also lasting influence.

A certain trend platform: allows tokenization of social posts, becoming a trend on the joint curve. Creators are eligible to receive 20% of the joint curve trading fees for each trend.

Token gated content access: Filter out noise

A content platform: Creators can launch tokenized spaces that provide curated content such as market insights, Alpha, and analysis, without the need for management and social pressure; users can unlock low-noise, high-value information by purchasing on-chain Keys linked to each creator's space. Keys are not just for access - they are tradable assets with a dynamically priced curve driven by demand. Meanwhile, AI will process chat data and signals into actionable insights.

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