Solana Poised to Launch First Kaito-Style Mindshare Leaderboard—Because Crypto Loves a Good Popularity Contest

Solana’s ecosystem is gearing up to debut its answer to Kaito’s mindshare rankings—a leaderboard tracking the most influential voices in its orbit. Move over, follower counts—this is crypto’s new vanity metric.

The blockchain—often dubbed ’the Ethereum killer’—is doubling down on community engagement. Because nothing says decentralization like gamified clout-chasing.

Wall Street bankers weep into their spreadsheets: while they track P/E ratios, Solana’s measuring meme power. The future of finance, folks.

But while the top of the leaderboard checks out at first glance, many in crypto still complain that tying token incentives to X posts makes CT lower-signal and higher-noise. 

“[Y]eah I absolutely hate it lol,” Blockworks Research analyst Boccaccio said when I asked if he had thoughts on the mindshare leaderboard trend. He added that such leaderboard programs are “bad for [the] marketing side because [they are] clearly being gamed and not useful anymore” and have “ruined CT’s noise/value ratio.”

Yatsenko agreed that “toxic incentives” and “short-term alignment” have turned many existing mindshare leaderboards into “spam-to-earn” programs. He added that this can be solved by algorithms prioritizing users showing “authentic, sustained engagement” around a small number of projects.

While the market may be reaching a saturation point for CT mindshare leaderboards, my view is that there’s a real business model here. Until now, crypto ecosystem builders looking to pay influencers sometimes had to go through middlemen and opaque value propositions. Sometimes influencers are allocated tokens for their services, which can be worth a lot of money.

In a perfect world, mindshare algorithms make ROI on influencer spending more measurable.

Interestingly, Yatsenko and his co-founder Max Bevza initially built MEV rebate software. But after going through Alliance DAO’s incubator, the duo decided to pivot to so-called AttentionFi — which can be loosely defined as apps monetizing crypto social media activity. Yatsenko said the seemingly unrelated sectors are “conceptually related.”

“MEV focuses on value gaps in transactions — AttentionFi focuses on value gaps in attention flows,” Yatsenko wrote. “Until now, we couldn’t measure attention value at scale. But with the latest advances in LLMs, we can finally understand and evaluate content quality, relevance and impact — automatically.”

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