Attention is Value, How Does InfoFi Capture the Zeitgeist?

Original Article Title: Mindshare is Everything: The Rise of InfoFi
Original Article Author: Marco Manoppo, primitive Partner
Original Article Translation: ChatGPT

Editor's Note: InfoFi financializes information, narrative, and market sentiment, relying on trusted oracles (such as Chainlink, Pyth) to securely bring off-chain data on-chain. Currently, oracles face challenges like data manipulation and subjectivity in sentiment analysis, requiring future optimization through AI integration and incentive mechanisms. InfoFi development directions include Narrative ETFs, influencer financial products, MemeCoin derivatives, etc., focusing on capturing and trading attention. It may evolve into an independent market rather than a subset of DeFi, with the key being the ability to create high-liquidity, scalable financial instruments to truly trade digital mindshare.

The following is the original content (reorganized for readability):

Mindshare is everything, and if you think I'm going to start with such an obvious statement like your typical VC, then you're absolutely right—but please, bear with me.

Attention has always been the most crucial "currency" because that's how goods are sold. Before the internet, the printing press and the advertising industry had their golden ages. Cigarette companies attracted attention by associating with controversial social topics and movements—in other words, to sell more.

In simple terms, attention → mindshare → channel distribution.

Subsequently, the era of brands arrived. Brands like Nike, Lucky Charms, Nutella mastered the art of emotion-driven marketing, increasing mindshare and ultimately leading to higher profit margins. Consumers were willing to pay a 30% premium for the same product just due to different brand awareness. I, too, fell victim to this trend—during college, I was crazily collecting Supreme Box Logos, a truly embarrassing period.

I almost spent $1000 on these useless things when I should have been buying ETH back then.

Fast forward to the 2020s, where everything revolves around digital mindshare.

This trend accelerated during and after the pandemic, but its roots can be traced back to the rise of YouTubers in the past 15-20 years. Early content creators like Ryan Higa and Smosh, driven purely by passion, started making "funny little videos." However, social media changed everything. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accelerated the viral effect, elevating the influence of YouTubers and independent creators beyond most B-list celebrities.

For example, Casey Neistat started his daily vlog in 2015—just a mere decade ago. At that time, YouTubers struggled to translate traffic into commercial success. Businesses tried to capitalize on this trend (e.g., BuzzFeed), but we all saw how that turned out.

Fast forward to today, creators like MrBeast have built multi-million-dollar business empires solely relying on their distribution channels. Rhett & Link are also a prime example, as they acquired and expanded the Mythical Entertainment Network through their YouTube audience.

Clearly, every business is now vying for mindshare.

Mindshare translates into a premium; in the modern capital market environment, it directly impacts stock prices (or token prices). If Elon Musk wasn't constantly stirring up online conversations, Tesla's market value wouldn't be where it is today. I believe this trend will continue to grow over the next five years and will further financialize—this is what we now refer to as the InfoFi era.

What is InfoFi?

InfoFi (Informational Finance) is a term popularized by Kaito, but I believe its scope far exceeds the initial definition. According to Grok (quoting Kaito), InfoFi is: "An emerging concept that combines financial incentives with the generation, validation, and distribution of information, usually based on decentralized systems.

Its goal is to use market forces to address issues in today's information economy, such as unreliable data, algorithmic bias, and unfair value distribution, ensuring information is more accurate, trustworthy, and efficiently organized and disseminated."

While this definition is reasonable, I believe InfoFi represents something more profound. Fundamentally, InfoFi is the tokenization of the information supply chain itself.

Its core idea is that information is not just free—it is a resource that can be priced, traded, and optimized through financial mechanisms. For decades, the prevailing monetization model for attention has been to first create a standalone product and then direct attention to it. This model has worked well, for example:

· Food Blogger → Restaurant/Seasoning (Uncle Roger, David Chang)

· Fashion Blogger → Personal Clothing Line (Alexa Chung, Kardashians)

· Fitness Blogger → Protein Powder/Energy Drink (Christian Guzman)

· Investor & Financial Institution → Financial Products (ARK Invest, VC Funds for LP/HNWIs)

· Fake Finance Guru → Trading Signal Group (you know who you are)

· Toxic Masculinity Blogger → Pyramid Scheme (you know who you are)

But now, we are standing at the threshold of directly trading "mindshare."

Imagine a world where people no longer need to create derivative businesses but can instead directly invest in and trade cultural trends, narratives, or attention cycles. For example, when Labubu goes viral, there is currently no effective way for the market to bet on its sustained popularity. Although there was a brief memecoin frenzy (LABUBU), its price action was hardly correlated with the actual trend—it was more influenced by the overall crypto market sentiment rather than pure mindshare.

InfoFi offers a new option: a more direct, more liquid mechanism that allows people to speculate directly on attention itself.

The Key to InfoFi's Development: The Role of Trusted Oracle

To truly make InfoFi a reliable market, there must be a trusted oracle data source to ensure that off-chain information is securely and immutably brought on-chain. As InfoFi transactions revolve around narratives, trends, and market sentiment, real-time data feeds become crucial.

Currently, oracle solutions such as UMA, Chainlink, Pyth, API3, and others have played a significant role in the DeFi market. These oracles provide off-chain data services to applications, enabling them to settle bets, verify market trends, and aggregate price data from multiple sources.

Challenges in Current Oracle Infrastructure

Despite the progress of decentralized oracles, there are still several challenges hindering the development of InfoFi:

1. Lack of Real-time Sentiment Analysis: Existing oracles mainly focus on price data or structured event outcomes, while InfoFi requires the ability to actively track and quantify social sentiment, interaction trends, and viral data propagation in real time.

2. Verifiability and Subjectivity Issues: Unlike price data, sentiment analysis involves subjective judgments. How can data be ensured to be objective, fair, and resistant to manipulation?

3. Scalability of Data Flows: Current oracles rely on limited verification data sources, while InfoFi requires large-scale data aggregation, including news, social media, prediction markets, forums, etc., to provide accurate insights.

4. Data Source Manipulation Risk: InfoFi relies on speculative narratives, so malicious manipulation (such as bot farms, fake interactions) may affect market trends. Oracles must be able to detect and filter out such anomalous data.

5. Economic Incentives for Data Providers: Who will verify the reliability of the data provided by oracles? Mechanisms such as staking, penalties, reputation scores, etc., must be robust enough to ensure that data providers report honestly.

The next generation of InfoFi oracles will rely on AI data aggregation, incentive-aligned reputation mechanisms, and real-time trend verification to ensure that narrative-based financial products have security, scalability, and resistance to manipulation.

Market Expansion of InfoFi: From Prediction Markets to Digital Sentiment Trading

Prediction markets have long been the prototype of InfoFi, allowing speculators to bet on real-world events based on informational advantages.

Platforms like Polymarket, Kalshi, Augur, and others have demonstrated this potential, but overall adoption remains niche.

Data markets have seen similar attempts. Back during the 2017 ICO frenzy, some tried to commodify and trade data, but due to unclear value propositions and inefficient tokenomics, these efforts failed to materialize.

InfoFi is a more mature and scalable version of these concepts. It goes beyond mere betting or data trading, transforming "mindshare" into a tradable asset class.

Possible InfoFi markets include:

· Narrative ETF: Tokenized baskets tracking popular trends (e.g., "AI Hot Topics Index," "Metaverse Attention Index")

· Influencer Financial Instruments: Income-sharing tokens for content creators, allowing fans to speculate on their future influence

· MemeCoin Derivatives: A more refined cultural speculation method, no longer limited to the traditional cryptocurrency model

· Tokenized Media Channels: Ownership of content platforms fragmented and tradeable, earning revenue based on a subscription model

The real question is: What kind of application will become the "killer app" of InfoFi? Will it emerge as a standalone track, or merely as a niche market within DeFi?

Key Takeaways

InfoFi has disrupted the notion that "information is free": It argues that attention, narrative, and data are assets with intrinsic value that can be traded, speculated on, and financialized through structured financial tools.

· InfoFi is the inevitable evolution of the attention economy: As mental real estate increasingly determines financial outcomes, the market will develop ways to directly capture and monetize attention cycles.

· InfoFi has opened up new financial markets: It is no longer about converting attention into commercial products but directly speculating on cultural trends, influencer growth, and trend changes.

· The key to InfoFi's success lies in Product-Market Fit (PMF): To become a true financial paradigm rather than just another DeFi gimmick, InfoFi needs to build a high-liquidity, scalable, and compelling trading mechanism.

Future Outlook

InfoFi is still in its early stages, but the financialization of attention has become an inevitable trend. Whether through prediction markets, influencer financial products, or trend trading through tokenization, the core of the next wave of financial innovation will be in effectively measuring and trading digital mindshare.

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