In 2025, attention is a better currency than data.

Mindshare is everything. If you think I’m going to start this article with such an obvious statement like your stereotypical VC, you’re absolutely correct — but please, bear with me.

Attention has always been the most important currency. That’s how people sell things. The pre-internet was the golden day of the printing press and advertising. Cigarette companies tie themselves to controversial social issues and movements to stand out - which is Latin for more sales.

Simply put attention → mindshare → distribution.

Then came the brand era. Nike, Lucky Charms, Nutella, and countless others mastered the art of emotion-driven marketing, which translated into higher mindshare and ultimately higher profit margins. People willingly paid a 30% markup for the exact same product simply because of brand perception. I, myself, was a victim of this trend when I was a college kid collecting the Supreme Box logo (shameful era).

i almost bought this crap for $1,000 when I should’ve bought ETH

Fast forward to the 2020s, everything is about digital mindshare.

This trend accelerated during and after COVID, but its roots trace back to the rise of YouTubers over the last 15-20 years. OG content creators like Ryan Higa and Smosh started as hobbyists making “funny little videos.” Then, social media changed everything. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram created a compounding effect on virality, elevating YouTubers and independent creators above most B-list celebrities.

For example, Casey Neistat launched his daily vlogs in 2015 — a mere decade ago — and even then, it wasn’t common for large YouTubers to leverage their reach into business ventures. Corporations tried to capitalize on this trend (BuzzFeed, anyone?), but we all saw how that ended. Fast forward to today, and creators like MrBeast have built multi-million-dollar businesses purely on their distribution channels. Rhett & Link, for instance, acquired and expanded the Mythical entertainment network by harnessing their YouTube audience.

Alas, it’s clear, all businesses are now vying for mindshare.

Mindshare is Latin for premium, and in the modern capital market era, means premium to your stock price (or token price). Tesla won’t be worth what it’s worth right now if Elon is not yapping 24/7. I believe this trend will continue to grow in the next 5 years, and it will continue to be financialized — setting the stage for what we can now call InfoFi.

If you get this reference we can be friends

What even is InfoFi?

The term InfoFi (Information Finance) has been popularized by Kaito, but I argue its scope is much broader than its initial definition.

According to Grok (and citing Kaito), InfoFi is:

“an emerging concept that blends financial incentives with the generation, verification, and distribution of information, often in decentralized systems. It aims to address issues in today’s information economy—such as unreliable data, biased algorithms, and unfair value distribution—by leveraging market forces to ensure more accurate, trustworthy, and efficiently curated information.”

While this definition is valid, I believe InfoFi encapsulates something even more profound.

→ At its core, I believe that InfoFi means we’re tokenizing the information supply chain itself.

It’s the idea that information isn’t just free — it’s a resource that can be valued, traded, and improved through financial mechanisms

For decades, monetizing attention required creating a separate product and then redirecting the attention to that product. This model has worked well:

• Food influencers → restaurants/condiments (Uncle Roger, David Chang)
• Fashion influencers → clothing lines (Alexa Chung, Kardashians)
• Fitness influencers → protein powders/energy drinks (Christian Guzman)
• Investors & financial institutions → financial products (ARK Invest, VC funds targeting LPs/HNWIs)
• Fake finance gurus → trading signal groups (iykyk)
• Toxic manosphere influencers → MLM schemes (iykyk)

But now, we are on the verge of trading the mindshare itself.

Imagine a world where, instead of creating derivative businesses, people can directly invest in and trade cultural trends, narratives, or attention cycles. For example, when Labubu was trending, there was no efficient way to bet on its sustained popularity. A memecoin ($LABUBU) briefly emerged, but its price action was largely uncorrelated with the actual trend—it was dictated by broader crypto market movements rather than pure mindshare.

InfoFi proposes an alternative: a more direct, liquid mechanism to speculate on attention itself.

The Role of Trusted Oracles in InfoFi

For InfoFi to truly emerge as a reliable sector, it requires a trusted Oracle data source to verify and bring off-chain information on-chain in a secure and tamper-proof manner. Since InfoFi applications involve the trading of narratives, trends, and market sentiment, real-time data feeds are crucial.

Currently, Oracle solutions such as UMA, Chainlink, Pyth, and API3 provide essential off-chain data services that power DeFi markets. These oracles enable applications to settle bets, verify market trends, and aggregate price data from multiple sources.

Challenges and Limitations of Current Oracle Infrastructure

Despite the progress in decentralized oracles, several challenges hinder the widespread adoption of InfoFi applications:

1. Lack of Real-Time Sentiment Analysis – Most Oracle networks focus on price feeds or structured event outcomes. To power InfoFi, oracles must be able to track and quantify social sentiment, engagement trends, and viral activity metrics with minimal lag.
2. Verifiability and Subjectivity – Unlike price data, sentiment analysis involves subjective interpretations. How do we ensure that sentiment data is objective and free from manipulation?
3. Scalability of Data Feeds – Oracles today rely on a limited set of verified sources. InfoFi requires highly scalable data aggregation across news articles, social media, prediction markets, and niche forums to provide accurate insights.
4. Data Source Manipulation – Since InfoFi is centered around speculation on narratives, adversaries may attempt to artificially amplify certain narratives (bot farms, fake engagement). Oracles must be able to detect and filter out such anomalies.
5. Economic Incentives for Data Providers – Who verifies that an Oracle-provided data feed is reliable? Mechanisms like staking, slashing, and reputation scoring need to be robust enough to ensure honest reporting.

The next evolution of oracles in InfoFi will likely involve AI-powered data aggregation, incentive-aligned reputation mechanisms, and real-time trend verification to ensure that financial products built on narratives are secure, scalable, and resistant to manipulation.

InfoFi’s Expanding Market Scope

Prediction markets, an early iteration of InfoFi, have long allowed speculators to wager on real-world events based on informational advantages. Platforms like Polymarket, Kalshi, and Augur demonstrate this potential, though adoption has remained niche.

Similarly, data marketplaces, which was an idea dating back to the 2017 ICO boom (showing my age) attempted to commoditize and trade datasets but failed to gain traction due to unclear value propositions and inefficient token economics.

InfoFi, however, represents a more evolved, scalable iteration of these concepts. Instead of focusing solely on betting or data transactions, InfoFi turns mindshare itself into a tradable asset class.

Examples of possible InfoFi markets:

• Narrative-based ETFs: Tokenized baskets tracking attention themes (e.g., “AI Trend Index,” “Metaverse Buzz Basket”)
• Influencer-backed financial instruments: Tokenized shares of creator revenue, allowing fans to speculate on a creator’s future influence
• Memecoin derivatives: More refined ways to speculate on cultural phenomena without relying on traditional crypto tokenomics
• Tokenized media channels: Subscription-based content platforms where ownership is fractionalized and tradable

The question is: what will be the killer application that cements InfoFi as its own category, rather than a sub-niche of DeFi?

Takeaways

1. InfoFi challenges the idea that information is free. Instead, it argues that attention, narratives, and data have intrinsic value that can be traded, speculated on, and financialized in a structured manner.
2. InfoFi is the natural progression of the attention economy. As mindshare increasingly determines financial outcomes, the market will develop ways to directly capture and monetize attention cycles.
3. InfoFi unlocks new financial markets. Instead of redirecting attention to businesses, InfoFi enables direct speculation on cultural moments, influencer growth, and trending narratives.
4. The key to InfoFi’s success lies in product-market fit. The challenge is creating instruments that are liquid, scalable, and attractive enough to stand out as a new financial paradigm—rather than being dismissed as just another DeFi gimmick.

Final Thoughts

We are still in the early days of InfoFi, but the financialization of attention is inevitable. Whether through prediction markets, influencer-based financial instruments, or tokenized trends, the next wave of financial innovation will center around how effectively we can value and trade digital mindshare.

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