InfoFi: Crypto’s Risky Bet on Monetizing Your Eyeballs

Forget decentralized finance—now they’re coming for your attention span. The latest crypto gold rush? ’Information Finance’ (InfoFi), where blockchain startups promise to tokenize everything from social media engagement to idle brainwaves. Venture capitalists are already salivating over the pitch decks.

But here’s the catch: nobody’s proven humans want their dopamine hits turned into tradable assets. Yet.

Wall Street veterans smirk while checking their Bloomberg terminals—after all, they’ve seen this movie before. Remember when ’monetizing user data’ just meant selling your privacy to advertisers? Now they’re slicing it into NFTs. Progress.

At a circulating market cap of $502 million today, KAITO is trading at a ~15.8 P/S ratio. If you’re willing to comps KAITO to traditional SaaS companies (~20x), then it suggests KAITO is undervalued.

The tricky thing, of course, is that no one really knows what the “right” multiples are for a crypto company, let alone one in a niche subsector. 

I think Kaito is leveraging token incentives to do something genuinely innovative. It’s struck up partnerships with major crypto teams like EigenLayer, Berachain and more.

Its success has attracted a few emerging competitors. One of them is Cookie DAO, a data analytics platform that ROSE to prominence during the AI token craze earlier this year. As far as I can tell, Cookies DAO is doing something almost identical. Instead of yaps, you have snaps. Instead of yappers, they’re called snappers. You get the idea.

This brings into question how strong Kaito’s moat is. 

Anyone can scrape public social media data. Switching costs are also fairly low. In theory, it’d be easy for Kaito’s clients to switch to another sentiment analysis platform.

Where its edge lies, I think, are in its AI tools, and how well it scores user-generated content and filters for high-quality content. That’s crucial because it determines what kind of marketing is rewarded, which in turn determines continued usage. 

The devil’s in the details.

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