Original author: sleepy.mid
Recently, Twitter has been flooded with posts, and I've seen many friends earning significant airdrops by "talking up" Huma. In today's article, I will attempt to break down the so-called InfoFi, exploring what has created it and what it has changed. With the birth and popularity of Kaito, we can now see a paradigm shift occurring within the Web3 world.
In this shift, "talking up" airdrops have transformed from a marginal behavior into a mainstream participation channel; "information output" has become a key element in building industry identity rather than just content creation; and "narrative ability" is taking over the dominant position of "usage behavior" in the airdrop system. All of this points to a single trend: the attention structure is being reconstructed, information behavior is being financialized, and consensus is becoming a resource that can be manufactured.
1. The Death of Interactive Airdrops Begins with Its Illusion
The logic of the old generation of airdrops was as follows: "We create a product, design interactions, and distribute tokens to early users. This can cultivate their usage habits and foster user retention." This logic established seemingly reasonable positive expectations between 2018 and 2022, but today it has collapsed:
- A large number of interactive addresses are script-driven, lacking genuine user intent;
- Projects launch with airdrops, airdrops lead to immediate sales, and users leave after short-term arbitrage;
- The so-called "incentive retention" has become empty talk, with the vast majority of projects experiencing a data cliff after airdrops.
You expect to tame today's users with future expectations, but users do not believe in that future at all. More critically, interactive behavior is no longer scarce and cannot reflect users' true intentions. The conclusion is obvious: airdrops have never been a cure for activating products; they are merely a traffic explosion device, suitable for making the market aware of you, but not for keeping users around.
Thus, the logic of airdrops began to shift from "Behavioral Finance" to "Information Finance": it is not about what you did, but what you said, who saw it, and how much social diffusion it brought. This is a transformation of the value recognition model and a re-understanding of the core driving factors in the crypto world: in a Web3 world where consensus precedes products and narratives precede usage, information is the original asset.
2. The Triple Logic Foundation of InfoFi
If we view InfoFi as a mechanism design, its logical foundation comes from three dimensions:
1) Reconstruction of Value Creation
Traditional airdrops measure "early value" based on interactive behavior. InfoFi believes that information behavior itself is the starting point for generating consensus. Every tweet, every meme, every opinion output is an entry into consensus, creating the market memory of the future.
2) Binding Mechanism of Personality and Identity
On-chain addresses are anonymous, but social behavior is not. InfoFi binds off-chain identity, expression methods, and social reach capabilities to on-chain addresses, forming a system of influence weight with personality traits.
This increases the "accuracy" of airdrop distribution, breaking away from the old thinking of "interaction equals user."
3) Deep Coupling of Narrative Timing and Capital Release
The project launch timing is highly coupled with the peak of social discourse, leveraging airdrops to stimulate early enthusiasm, igniting the attention dividend window, and forming liquidity pivot points. In this structure, "talking up" is no longer a cheap behavior but a deep alignment with the logic of crypto consensus. To put it bluntly: talking up is the native mining model of the information age.
- In PoS, capital is a form of collateral;
- In InfoFi, influence is a form of "collateral."
In the "talking up" logic, you are collateralizing your identity, your opinions, and the social risks of voicing for a project, which is not fundamentally different from traditional participation methods, and may even require greater upfront costs (you need to understand the project, produce content, and bear the risk of speech), representing a complete value creation path. When on-chain behavior is mechanized and scripted, the mouth becomes the only input that still carries a personal touch. This is also why those who talk up can gain an advantage in the InfoFi mechanism, as they provide social trust that cannot be faked by contracts.
Of course, there are now many instances of using AI to generate content for airdrops, copying content, disguising opinions, and mass-producing content farms. This is a problem that InfoFi project teams need to address through model optimization and identity recognition mechanisms.
But just like in the Web2 SEO era, even "link farms" and "content farms" serve certain distribution goals; they do not destroy the system but rather push it to evolve further.
3. InfoFi is a Positive Response from Web3 to Attention Finance
Let’s compare social media with another infrastructure that directly reaches users. Wallets are the cold start layer, while social media is the hot start layer. Wallets represent "operational rights," while social media represents "discourse rights." In this information-first, asset-lagging structure, all early users are forced to become "content distribution nodes." You are not promoting a project; you are creating a "consensus air layer" for the release of the project's tokens. This air layer is not void; it is a form of informational friction that provides legitimacy for capital flow.
InfoFi is building a mechanism: whoever can create a greater social friction surface for me, I will give more chips to. In this structure, "talking up" is not a shortcut but a professional entry point into the social consensus mechanism. This marks the participation of information as a financial asset in production relations. The rapid development of talking up airdrops is a manifestation of the narrative itself becoming a product. Projects are constructing narratives, users are participating in narratives, platforms are recognizing narratives, and tokens are carrying narratives. In this on-chain society, narratives go live before products, and content flows faster than code. InfoFi is the orthodox response of the crypto world to the financialization of attention, and talking up is one natural way to participate, rather than a gray area. If usage is proof of participation, then information expression is proof of trust. If liquidity is the lifeblood of the market, then social volume is the source of that lifeblood.
4. Next Steps: Super-Individual Consensus Engineering, Information as Organizational Asset
If you pay enough attention, you will find that it has already begun to vaguely show the embryonic form of some industrial logic. A group of KOLs are no longer working solo but are participating in narratives in an organized manner. Future airdrop narratives will no longer be the result of collective emergence but will resemble the production of a drama, with clear thematic design, rhythm arrangement, and role division:
- The project's cold start phase is the preheating;
- The period before IDO is the climax buildup;
- The launch day creates high-energy highlights;
- After the airdrop lands, the organization conducts a collective review, outputting successful narrative templates.
We will see "content creators + topic organizers + social amplifiers + visual aesthetic planners" forming small communication DAOs to collaboratively engage in information battles. The most radical extrapolation is that information itself will take on part of the liquidity issuance function. Past Liquidity Bootstrapping emphasized capital coordination; in the future, we may see Info Bootstrapping, determining the distribution ratio, price benchmarks, and even circulation windows of initial tokens through the depth and breadth of narrative dissemination. First create the narrative; the token is merely a prop for the climax of the plot. Information is no longer a medium to assets but a part of the asset creation process itself.
We are entering an era where narratives are structurally manufactured. In this era: whoever can organize more people's expressions will have stronger consensus generation capabilities; whoever can create replicable narrative rhythms will be able to forge true "information assets." The mouth is no longer just a mining machine; it is becoming an industrial belt.
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