Updated On 10 June 2025
Published On 3 June 2025
In 2025, an era characterised by information overload, the challenge lies not in accessing data but in discerning its relevance and value. To address this issue, the crypto market saw the emergence of Information Finance (InfoFi), an expanding sector within the Web3 ecosystem that leverages financial mechanisms to extract, aggregate, and disseminate valuable information as a public good. This concept was first introduced in Vitalik Buterin’s essay ‘From prediction markets to info finance’ published in November 2024, which envisions systems where markets are deliberately designed to elicit specific information from participants—unlike traditional finance, where information is incidentally revealed through prices.
One such example is prediction markets, which aggregate dispersed information through price discovery, creating financial incentives for bettors to reveal their true beliefs about particular future events.
DWF Ventures recently explored this transformative landscape, highlighting the key players and innovations that are shaping InfoFi. We break down the analysis in more detail in this article.
Are YOU suffering from an information overload? From prediction markets to the AI-powered search engines and modular data layers today, InfoFi has evolved from just a concept to a massive standalone sector. What exactly is InfoFi and who are the key players you should know? 🧵
To explore the insights and context behind these innovations in greater depth, continue reading as the evolution of this sector is unpacked in detail.
Let’s start with Kaito, a pioneer in this space. Founded in 2022 by former Citadel quant Yu Hu, Kaito has positioned itself as a leading AI-powered platform dedicated to building a fairer and more efficient attention economy. Initially launched as a crypto-specific search engine, Kaito has since expanded its offerings to include a suite of products: Kaito Pro, Kaito Yaps, and Kaito Connect. Its flagship product, Kaito Pro, indexes thousands of sources, including social media, forums, research, news, and podcasts, using semantic AI to deliver a unified feed of actionable insights.
Kaito Connect is a distinctive InfoFi network within this suite, designed to facilitate the fair and efficient distribution of capital. It integrates AI-powered insights from Kaito Pro with live market dynamics to ensure that attention and investment flow to the most promising projects, supporting a more transparent and equitable ecosystem for creators and investors.
On the community side, in December 2024, Kaito introduced ‘Yaps’, a tokenised attention programme that rewards users for sharing valuable insights on X (formerly Twitter). By employing AI algorithms to verify Proof-of-Work, Proof-of-Exchange, and Proof-of-Insight, Kaito accurately scores and ranks users based on their contributions to specific topics. This open infrastructure has enabled over 60 external teams and crypto projects (as of 2 June 2025), including boop.fun, Camp Network, and Monad, to host social campaigns and airdrops that reward users based on their rankings on the respective Yapper Leaderboards.
Other features have also been introduced to enhance the user experience within the Kaito ecosystem. For example, Yapper content feeds provide users with curated updates and topic-specific discussions, helping them stay engaged and informed. Additionally, updates to Kaito Earn have expanded the ways in which users can monetise their attention and insights, reinforcing Kaito’s broader mission to reward meaningful contributions within the Web3 space.
Cookie DAO is another rising InfoFi player, positioning itself as the data layer for the agentic economy. It offers a modular data infrastructure providing analytics and insights on market movements and social engagement. Initially focused on the AI agent sector, Cookie DAO has since expanded to cover the broader crypto market with its v1.0 alpha release. Its platform, cookie.fun, is the first index of AI agents in crypto, tracking live on-chain and social data for over 1,500 AI-driven and infrastructure projects. Built on 7TB of live data feeds, it helps crypto traders make data-driven decisions by highlighting genuine trends over hype. The Cookie ecosystem even powers an autonomous agent, Agent Cookie, that posts real-time insights on X (formerly Twitter), and its DataSwarm APIs serve projects like CoinGecko.
On 20 May, Cookie DAO launched Cookie Snaps, a project-to-creator marketplace within the cookie.fun ecosystem. Within just one day, 25,825 creators had already joined, and in the days following, Cookie Snaps hosted a successful campaign with SparkFi. How does it work? Creators earn SNAPS points through referrals or by participating in campaigns. These points determine their Snap Scores, which are used to rank and reward them. This transparent system enables crypto projects to run targeted rewards campaigns while recognising the role of content creators in shaping project visibility.
In addition to Cookie Snaps, Cookie DAO has introduced other features such as smart feeds, token sentiment analysis, KOL statistics, and project-specific feeds. Another highlight is Deep Research, a tool that collates real-time market and project summaries, serving as a dynamic newsletter to keep users informed.
With cookie.fun v1.0 expanding beyond AI to encompass broader crypto intelligence in Q2 2025, Cookie DAO is focused on democratising analytics and returning the value of information to its users.
Another InfoFi project recently rising in mindshare is Stay Loud, which combines Kaito’s mindshare rewards with a fee-driven model inspired by BelieveApp. Operating on Solana, it is an experiment that tests the hypothesis that attention alone can create sustainable value in Web3 by distributing its upcoming token’s swap fees to the top 25 mindshare contributors each week. To participate, users post about LOUD on social media, while Kaito’s AI tracks and ranks these contributions in a mindshare leaderboard. The top content creators, as well as Kaito stakers, then earn a share of the rewards distributed in Solana (SOL) native coin, creating a self-reinforcing cycle where hype leads to more trading and further incentives for organic promotion.
Stay Loud has also announced the so-called Initial Attention Offering (IAO), structured in two phases: the first phase is exclusive to Kaito’s top LOUD yappers, and the second phase is open to users with a minimum of 10 smart followers. This transparent design, with its fixed token supply, locked liquidity, and absence of insider advantages, represents a bold attempt to tokenise virality and explore the limits of attention economics on-chain.
The InfoFi industry is expanding rapidly, even as Kaito and Cookie DAO continue to dominate the crypto market.
Emerging players are entering the space with their own distinct approaches:
Each of these teams is competing for a distinct niche within the InfoFi sector, offering unique solutions to the challenges of information overload and contributing to the ecosystem’s growing diversity and momentum. As the sector matures, the question remains: what does the future hold for InfoFi?
Looking ahead, InfoFi represents the emergence of a new paradigm in which financial incentives are employed not merely for speculation or profit, but as a means to produce and validate valuable, credible information that benefits the broader public. As demonstrated by the proven effectiveness of prediction markets like Polymarket, InfoFi extends beyond crypto and holds the potential to transform how information is sourced, verified, and rewarded across industries.
However, there are important considerations that come with this promise. Mindshare does not necessarily translate to market share; while attention and visibility are critical, they must be supported by robust fundamentals such as trading volume and liquidity efficiency, particularly when assessing decentralised exchanges or other protocols. Additionally, while incentives like those offered by Yaps and Snaps stimulate content creation, they can also lead to engagement farming that risks overshadowing genuinely valuable contributions. Despite these challenges, the promise of InfoFi is undeniable.
DWF Ventures remains enthusiastic about the innovative possibilities that InfoFi unlocks, particularly within launch mechanisms and launchpads, and we encourage builders exploring these frontiers to fill out the form on our crypto venture capital fund’s page to connect and collaborate.
