gm Bankless Nation, Welcome to Mindshare by Bankless, our newsletter for all things AI x Crypto! This week, Kaito made waves with its $KAITO drop—could InfoFi be the next big onchain frontier?
📸 Weekly Market Snapshot: While many AI agents saw a pullback this week, three particular tokens saw outperformance across the overall token leaderboard, commanding AI mindshare amid considerable gains.
$KAITO surged nearly ~60% from its launch yesterday as Kaito continues to push for a new era for AI-powered intelligence (more on this below).
Story Protocol’s $IP saw big gains too, spiking up to ~300% before retracing to end the week up ~150%. A protocol for tokenized IP, Story looks to prepare the asset class of IP rights for the AI age, allowing AI models and their outputs to be registered as IP and AI agents to trade IP rights autonomously.
Lastly, Bittensor’s $TAO also climbed ~10%on the week following the rollout of its dTAO upgrade,a major economic overhaul that provides each subnet in Bittensor’s network with its own token and liquidity pool paired with TAO.
Token prices as of 3pm ET
24hr
7d
VIRTUALS $1.15
↗ 4.5%
↘ 19.8%
AI16Z $0.33
↘ 3.3%
↘ 30.0%
ARC $0.20
↘ 15.3%
↘ 45.7%
. . .
AI ROLLUP
The Attention Economy
With the crypto industry now seemingly leaving its “financial nihilism” phase, memecoin mania is waning, and sentiments are shifting back toward the fundamentals of frontier innovations.
Against this backdrop, one frontier scene that's gaining major steam in the AI x Crypto space right now is Information Finance.
In AI Rollup #12, David and Ejaaz zoom in here and explore how Kaito's new InfoFi approach creates a data layer for the attention economy, potentially positioningtheplatform to become the “Google of Crypto.”
Plus, catch more updates on Bittensor, Grok 3, and Virtuals Protocol's latest revenue milestones. Watch the full episode for all the details! 👇
Currently the talk of the town, Kaito has emerged as an AI-powered solution to one of crypto’s most persistent headaches: poor information.
Founded by former Citadel portfolio manager Yu Hu, Kaito’s main platform, Kaito Pro, scours 1,000s of sources—from Twitter to Discord chats and governance forums—to produce structured, real-time insights on everything from upcoming project catalysts to shifting market sentiments.
The company has built on these foundations recently, introducing additional products like Kaito Yaps and Kaito Connect, which together expand Kaito’s ability to surface quality information and direct attention within its network. Given the amount of “yapping” that Kaito fuels and its token debut this week, it's a good time to understand how the platform works.
Addressing InfoFi
Kaito’s core philosophy revolves around the concept of “InfoFi,” where market forces—rather than centralized platform algorithms—determine how attention is distributed.
Of course, social media echo chambers and algorithmic biases often lead to suboptimal or unfair outcomes. In contrast, InfoFi seeks to harness the wisdom of actual network participants, letting them dictate which voices and topics deserve attention and thus gain traction. This is where yaps come in, a vehicle for tokenizing attention.
Kaito Yaps & Connect
Going beyond the dashboard functionality of Kaito Pro, Yaps and Connect fuse into a novel incentive framework aimed at crowdsourcing high-quality crypto analysis and engagement.
Through the Yaps protocol—which culminated in yesterday's token generation event (TGE)—participants are awarded “Yap points” for well-researched content on Twitter, like meticulous protocol breakdowns or detailed critiques.
Kaito's AI judges each entry for relevance, originality, and engagement and filters out those it deems low effort. The contributors with the best posts are premiered on a leaderboard which helps track their influence over time, helping surface which community members create the most value.
Tied into the Yaps Protocol is Kaito Connect, which serves as the network's nerve center, channeling these curated insights directly to apps or ecosystems. By blending AI analytics with market-based incentives, Connect reimagines how both attention and capital move throughout the ecosystem.
For instance, a DAO could automatically gauge ongoing community sentiment on a governance proposal, while a brand might launch a Yapper campaign where budgets and exposure are contingent on verifiable creator performance.
The Yapper Launchpad
The Yapper Launchpad completes the Kaito ecosystem trifecta, offering a stage for new projects to harness Kaito’s AI-driven ranking model.
Each week, three initiatives make their debut with their own dedicated Yapper Leaderboard, tapping into a gamified structure that spurs community engagement and highlights top contributors.
Meanwhile, the AI-backed scoring system helps identify who’s creating real impact, filtering out noise, and surfacing potential marketing partners. The feedback loop here helps projects refine their outreach and, for high performers, distribute rewards efficiently.
$KAITO
As of yesterday, $KAITO, the token of Kaito, is officially live, with 10% available immediately and another 32.2% earmarked for “Ecosystem & Network Growth,” likely implying more rounds of rewards.
The first round proved quite lucrative for top yappers, with a small set of influencers earning as much as $200-$300k for less than 3 months of tweeting.
Beyond just stimulating the market though, $KAITO also holds multiple functions within the platform’s network, such as:
Staking — You can lock your tokens for sKAITO to receive boosted voting power and rewards, with particular focus on those who staked over 75% of their claimed supply. Currently, ~16% of claimed $KAITO is being staked to earn ~50% APR.
Network Currency —$KAITO is a medium of exchange for transactions and interactions across the ecosystem’s platforms.
Governance Mechanism — The token also facilitates decentralized decision-making, allowing holders to propose and vote on protocol and algorithm changes over time.
In the months ahead, as Kaito refines its InfoFi vision and deepens the interplay between AI curation and community-driven analysis, the platform appears well-positioned to play a major role in how attention and capital flows in our industry.
While exact details about the road ahead here remain hazy, the expansion of the Yaps system to additional social media platforms seems likely, though where would be the question.
All that said, the big idea this week is that Kaito's token launch has introduced a new way to surface signal and reward creators in crypto, so it's worth keeping an eye on going forward.
While much hinges on continued growth and the exact implementation of upcoming features, the platform's multifaceted network design and emphasis on token-based incentives suggests it has the foundation for what could become a new paradigm in market intelligence. For now, only time will tell!
The Fraxtal ecosystem is expanding at lightning speed—this month’s biggest highlight is IQAI.com, the newest Agent Tokenization platform from IQ and Frax. IQ is building autonomous, intelligent, tokenized agents launching on Fraxtal in Q1. Empower onchain agents with built-in wallets, tokenized ownership, and decentralized governance—all within a fast-growing Fraxtal ecosystem.
Not financial or tax advice. Bankless content is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
Disclosure. From time to time, we may add links in this newsletter to products we use. We may receive a commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless team holds crypto assets.
