InfoFi — information finance — was built on a simple premise: pay people in tokens for posting, and you convert attention into a measurable, tradeable asset. Platforms like Kaito ranked creators by “mindshare” and projects bought their way up the leaderboard.
It worked until it was gamed. On 9 January 2026, CryptoQuant’s CEO documented 7.75 million crypto-related posts in twenty-four hours — reported as a 1,224% spike over baseline. Six days later X changed its API policy and cut the platforms off. X’s product lead described what the model had produced as a tremendous amount of AI slop and reply spam.
Token prices followed. KAITO dropped roughly 20%, COOKIE around 15%, LOUD 16%.
The lesson wasn’t that attention doesn’t matter. It was that attention you pay for directly becomes worthless the moment everyone can pay for it.
The category didn’t disappear — it moved. Information finance consolidated around prediction markets, where people put capital behind what they actually believe rather than being paid to say it.
The distinction matters. Engagement rewards measure who posted most. Prediction markets measure who was right, and price it. One is gameable by bots; the other costs money to be wrong.
By early 2026 the sector reported record combined weekly volume in the billions, with Polymarket, Kalshi and Opinion emerging as the main venues. Polymarket forecast data now feeds mainstream financial media, and Coinbase has integrated event contracts alongside crypto trading.
For projects, that shift changes the marketing question. You can no longer buy mindshare. You can still earn credibility — and credibility is now the scarcer asset.
The replacement is slower. It is also harder to fake.
What died
What replaced it
Paying for leaderboard mindshare
Bot-inflated engagement metrics
Campaign-window attention spikes
Token-incentivised creators
Attention as the metric
We’ve worked in crypto since 2018 and with 100+ startups and scaleups globally — through several full market cycles, not one narrative. If you’re rebuilding a growth plan that depended on paid attention, we’ll tell you honestly what we’d do instead.