InfoFi: A financial experiment in the era of artificial intelligence, KOL reports that traffic has dropped to historical lows!

From the information revolution of the 20th century, which triggered an explosive growth of human knowledge, to today's era of information overload and attention scarcity, the core resource of humanity has been constantly shifting. Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon foresaw the concept of "attention economy" as early as 1971, believing that "the abundance of information leads to a scarcity of attention." In today's world filled with abundant content in Web2.0, our attention has become a scarce resource, while the true creators of attention—users and content creators—often serve merely as "free fuel" for the platform's monetization.

InfoFi (Information Finance) has emerged as a response. It is not a coincidental buzzword, but rather a paradigm shift driven by blockchain, token incentives, and artificial intelligence, aimed at redefining the value of attention. InfoFi is committed to transforming unstructured cognitive behaviors—views, information, reputation, interactions, trend insights—into quantifiable and tradable digital assets. Through decentralized incentive mechanisms, InfoFi aims to reward all those who create, disseminate, or evaluate information. This is not only a technological innovation but also a redistribution of power: who owns attention, and who controls information?

However, any paradigm shift is not linear. Bubbles, speculation, hype, and chaos are inevitable. A senior KOL's self-narrative may allow us to glimpse the true nature of the InfoFi experiment: will it become a user-centric revolution, or another centralized illusion?

1. InfoFi Ecosystem: The Three-Layer Market of Information × Finance × Artificial Intelligence

InfoFi is a complex system that integrates financial logic, semantic computing, and gamified incentive mechanisms into a new type of market. It is not just a content platform or a financial protocol, but a full-end ecosystem that combines information trading, attention incentives, reputation scoring, and intelligent forecasting.

The core of InfoFi lies in the financialization of information—transforming previously unpriced cognitive activities (perspectives, insights, interactions, trend forecasts) into measurable "quasi-assets" with market value. This converts fragmented content into cognitive products with risk, return, and speculative potential. Platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi exemplify this, as they provide real-time pricing for public opinion and expectations.

But relying solely on finance is insufficient to filter out the signals in the noise. At this point, artificial intelligence comes into play. It mainly plays two roles:

Semantic filtering: The first line of defense against low-quality content.

Behavior modeling: Evaluation based on users' social behavior, originality, and influence.

Platforms like Kaito AI, Mirra, and Wallchain use artificial intelligence to allocate rewards and screen participants, acting as algorithmic judges. Information is the foundation of this ecosystem—it is not only a tradable commodity but also a source of social connections and market sentiment. Unlike the hard assets (USDC, BTC) in DeFi, the assets in InfoFi are fluid, timely, and abstract—trust, opinions, trends, insights. Here, creators act as market makers, providing valuation opinions. Users are investors, expressing perceived value through interaction with content. Platforms and artificial intelligence serve as exchanges and regulators, ensuring fairness and efficiency.

This three-layer structure has generated a new model: signal trading-based prediction markets, Yap-to-Earn (talking = mining), reputation protocols like Ethos that convert behavior into trust scores, attention markets tracking emotional fluctuations such as noise and trends, and token-gated platforms like Backroom that reimagine paid content through access economics. Together, they form a multi-faceted ecosystem that includes value discovery, reward distribution, identity recognition, and governance—cognitive financial infrastructure itself.

However, this complexity also brings vulnerability. Subjective information is difficult to unify in valuation. Financial incentives can easily lead to manipulation. The opacity of artificial intelligence challenges transparency. InfoFi must continuously adjust to avoid becoming a gamified attention trap. Fundamentally, InfoFi is a social technological experiment—a model of information governance rather than just asset governance—aimed at shaping a decentralized, intelligent market of truth and trust.

2. KOL Statement: InfoFi is here, and my traffic has dropped to an all-time low

The core of InfoFi lies in the design of its incentive mechanism. Whether it's predicting, posting, building trust, or mining attention, it ultimately comes down to: who contributes? Who gets rewarded? Who bears the risk? InfoFi aims to break the exploitative Web2.0 model and return value to the original contributors. However, this redistribution is not inherently fair—it depends on the accuracy and ethics of the incentive mechanism. At its best, InfoFi can become a win-win innovation hub; at its worst, it may degenerate into a capital-driven "retail trap."

A senior KOL shared his personal experience:

"In April 2023, I joined CT (Crypto Twitter) with a group of friends. At that time, we were all writing airdrop strategies, spending 1-2 hours crafting a tweet, and easily receiving 100,000 views within 12 hours. We did this every day: wake up, write tweets, release them, eat, sleep, and repeat the cycle. I think during that time, our small group of content creators probably occupied about 10% of the entire CT's attention. Looking back now, it truly was a golden era. Personally, I would receive 1-2 collaboration invitations from protocol parties each month, who wanted to promote their events. But back then, it wasn't about the money; it was about influence. One day I woke up and found that a tweet from my account, which only had 10,000 followers, had actually garnered 400,000 views. At that moment, I thought: 'Is this real? I can hardly believe it.' Seeing such high views and likes brought me joy that was 100 times greater than the numbers in my wallet (which at that time was only four digits, but still, money is money, and this was the first time in my life I earned so much)."

This situation continued until September 2023, when the algorithm underwent some changes. This KOL faded out of CT until December 2023.

"Around August 2023, I realized that the airdrop space is not a long-term plan and is not suitable for me. I want to... become a DeFi newbie. Where are all the creators who are doing airdrop content now? I can't see them at all in the information flow, like ardizor, CC2, and so on."

In December 2023, this KOL welcomed a new chapter in their CT career. "A new writing style, more dedicated effort, new illustrations, and more connections, yet the views have decreased. You might wonder, have the views really decreased? That's right, they have indeed decreased. I've started to invest much more energy than before, but my posts only have 20,000 views. Well, sometimes they can reach 100,000, but it's not as bad as it is now."

He pointed out that due to the popularity of the InfoFi narrative (mainly because of Kaito), people are releasing low-quality content. The overall quality of content has significantly decreased, and 99% of people post because "the X protocol allocates 5% of tokens to the yappers, so I need to yap a bit more." The more rewards allocated to the yapper by the project, the worse the situation becomes.

"I feel that the quality of my content has reached an all-time high, and the effort I put in is also increasing simultaneously, but the view count and the number of new followers have dropped to an all-time low. My entire information flow is filled with content from the Kaito ranking, which is of no value whatsoever."

3. Challenges and Future Prospects of InfoFi

The KOL's narrative reveals the severe challenges faced in the development of InfoFi:

Bad money drives out good money: In pursuit of token rewards, a large amount of low-quality content floods the platform, leading to a decline in overall content quality and diluting genuinely valuable information.

Robots and manipulation: The Yap-to-Earn model easily attracts robot accounts and participation in farms, leading to manipulation of leaderboards and reward distribution.

Incentive mechanism imbalance: The opaque points system, unfulfilled airdrop promises, and unbalanced rewards make many users feel like unpaid workers.

The KOL suggested: "Perhaps during a quiet market period, we should discuss various agreements on Kaito, try to provide valuable content, improve content quality as much as possible, and make it unique." He emphasized that this path is becoming increasingly difficult, and only the strongest can survive and thrive.

Conclusion:

InfoFi, as a financial experiment in the era of artificial intelligence, aims to redefine the value of attention through blockchain and token incentives. However, based on the personal experiences of KOLs, its development has not been smooth sailing. Achieving a dynamic balance between incentive models, value acquisition, and real user needs, while avoiding becoming a gamified attention trap, will be key to InfoFi's success. Only when the incentive mechanism fairly rewards genuine signal contributors and effectively absorbs long-tail users can this system continue to develop and truly realize its vision of an "information governance model."