I attended Abu Dhabi Financial Week and learned some perspectives on InfoFi.
As always, thank you for your comments and suggestions—open discussion and feedback are how we learn and improve.
Here are some of my recent thoughts, combined with insights gained from recent meetings with some of the top Web 2.0 brands:
- Globally, content distribution is becoming increasingly decentralized—shifting from platform-paid to creator-paid, with a particular focus on the overlap between users and creators. Whop pioneered the pay-per-view model, while SideShift has driven the creation of user-generated content (UGC)—these two purely US Web 2.0 platforms have a strong presence on US campuses, collectively driving over a billion dollars in transactions annually. Therefore, this is a huge trend.
- The rise of artificial intelligence has reduced the marginal cost of content to almost zero. All social media platforms are strengthening their anti-bot mechanisms—AI-driven content is appearing on all platforms, especially on LinkedIn, X, and YouTube. Even on TikTok, which performs reasonably well overall, the comment section is flooded with spam, often just simple summaries of the original video. Therefore, the challenges are obvious.
- Marketing efficiency in the cryptocurrency space remains low. In the past, it relied primarily on agents and KOLs for marketing. Today, it has evolved into a hybrid model, sometimes even a dual-track system. The emergence of InfoFi undoubtedly provides a foothold for many ordinary user creators to enter the field, giving them the opportunity to gain exposure while learning, using, and sharing the protocol.
Earlier this year, when I was in South Korea (Kaito's largest market), I was surprised to find many part-time professionals (lawyers, bankers, etc.) using Kaito as a side hustle to learn about cryptocurrency and connect with like-minded people.
Therefore, a few months ago, we launched an on-chain multiplier mechanism that rewards not only content creation but also on-chain usage of the protocol. This is a trend towards a user evangelist model. Today, we are working closely with many innovative applications to promote their use to users worldwide.
I believe one shortcoming of Web 3.0 compared to Web 2.0 platforms is that content creation requires a minimum threshold for social influence or on-chain usage. In Web 2.0, this was achieved through review and interviews. In Web 3.0, perhaps driven by a completely permissionless philosophy, some teams choose to have no barriers whatsoever.
Looking ahead, we will strive to set minimum reputation or on-chain usage as eligibility criteria. Indeed, what makes Web 3.0 unique is our vast amounts of data, including wallet-level data. One metric we're about to launch is "Net Worth of Followers"—frankly, this is impossible to fake.
Looking around, it's clear that Kaito currently has the strictest anti-bot mechanisms, and we encourage other platforms to adopt equally stringent measures:
- Replies are not counted in statistics
- Reputation threshold restrictions
- Strict limits on interaction and group spamming
- Weekly tweet cap to curb excessive spamming
And many more measures
We have open-sourced our reputation protocol, which anyone can freely integrate.
Finally, I want to say that with the global trend towards the widespread adoption of user-generated content (UGC) and artificial intelligence (AI) content, cryptocurrency has entered a truly unique opportunity.
As Balaji said, "AI makes everything fake, while cryptocurrency makes everything real again."
In fact, wallet profiling provides the best way to understand the overall situation of a particular account. This is precisely why we are currently better at filtering bots than Company X.
I believe cryptocurrency has the potential to play a role in discerning truth from falsehood on global social media.
Ultimately, if decentralized social media isn't the final answer…
