Web3 Attention Economy: Consumer Applications and the Theory of Valuable Attention
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Web3 Attention Economy: Consumer Applications and the Theory of Valuable Attention
"News is the price."
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: SHAYON SENGUPTA
Translation: Block unicorn
"Price is the news" is a common adage in the crypto world, often cited whenever rapid price movements online spark greater participation and attention. However, I find the inverse of this statement perhaps more profound: "News is the price."
In my contribution to "Multicoin's Expectations for 2024," I described a noticeable shift in how assets are priced—one I call the "Theory of Value Attention." In crypto, the primary inputs into asset pricing aren't multifactor models around risk premiums or cash flows, but rather the perceived amount of time, energy, and capital invested by a community around an asset. Importantly, this is not a normative claim, but rather an observation based on historical capital flows within tokens as an asset class.
The internet enables arbitrary, bidirectional information transfer. Cryptocurrency builds on this foundation by enabling arbitrary, bidirectional value transfer. Today’s consumer internet—streaming platforms, online media, mobile apps, social media, etc.—can be summarized as an attention market, meaning money and attention are increasingly exhibiting similar characteristics.
In the 1930s, Benjamin Graham had to wait for quarterly reports and physical stock certificates purchased through human brokers to express his value investing thesis. In 2020, news that hedge funds were shorting GameStop spread across Reddit communities, prompting thousands of retail investors to buy shares on Robinhood, driving the stock price up 15x in thirty days—taking on hedge funds and blowing up their positions (the "Reddit vs. Wall Street" phenomenon). The consumer internet and crypto infrastructure have made the fundamental units of information and value smaller (Block unicorn note: as information asymmetry shrinks, price discrepancies in markets also get arbitraged away), while simultaneously increasing the volume and frequency of data consumption and value transactions. As this trend accelerates, the Theory of Value Attention becomes tighter—information is money, money is information.
While markets for attention and value exist in reality, we haven’t yet truly seen them collide. When we think about crypto-native consumer applications, this is exactly what we’re looking for. Crypto enables the rapid creation of new assets around attention and trading wherever such attention is concentrated: in consumer-facing applications.
In the coming years, we expect consumer developers to meaningfully integrate cryptocurrency into the structure and user experience of their applications, dramatically expanding the scope of what can be traded and where. Internally, we refer to these kinds of applications as "Publisher-Exchanges."
Block unicorn note: A "Publisher-Exchange" refers to Web3 social platforms where users can publish content and trade. It allows users to create content, attract attention, conduct transactions, and earn value from it.
Publisher-Exchanges
Exchanges naturally achieve product-market fit in crypto because one of crypto’s core utilities is value transfer. Coinbase (fiat on-ramps and centralized exchange), Tensor (digital collectibles exchange), Jito (intent and blockspace exchange), and Phantom (order flow exchange) are all forms of exchanges.
In crypto, exchanges occupy a position analogous to major publishers in the consumer internet (e.g., X, Instagram, The New York Times): publishers control the flow of attention in the consumer internet, while exchanges control the flow of capital in crypto.
As we think about the next generation of consumer applications, we expect the boundary between exchanges and publishers to dissolve, creating new experiences that blend money and attention.
Kyle (Multicoin CEO) wrote in his 2024 thoughts about composability at the UI layer. A simplified interpretation of this argument is that the next big online exchange won’t resemble traditional order books and depth charts like Coinbase; instead, it will look more like a short-form video app where users can bet on the virality of upcoming creator content, or a group chat where friends can instantly launch NFT collections based on inside jokes or memes, or an are.na-style curation platform where designers gain reputation and wealth for their taste. In other words, leveraging unique features of crypto, consumer apps become both publishers and exchanges: Publisher-Exchanges.
Publisher-Exchanges increase the surface area for new asset issuance by embedding issuance and native trading directly into the application front-end, allowing novel ways to interact with and coordinate these assets. Introducing trading into familiar settings may seem narrow or analogical, but we believe narrow markets are the starting point for discovering emerging behaviors that will give rise to massive new platforms.
This will be a golden age of experimentation—for developers, it’s a blank canvas to experiment with combining native issuance and trading with new types of application experiences. "Crypto-native consumer applications" will treat these design principles as first-class citizens.
Emerging Categories of Publisher-Exchanges
The goal of a Publisher-Exchange is to enable trading alongside whatever content users are paying attention to at any given moment, fulfilling user needs in real time. Next-generation consumer applications in crypto will allow users to issue and trade assets natively, directly monetizing the user attention they capture.
For founders building Publisher-Exchanges, we believe certain design principles drawn from the history of publishers and exchanges will be relevant.
Throughout the history of the consumer internet, publishers have essentially been content markets, and markets are driven by two core attributes: 1) discovery and curation (presenting content users want to see and engage with), and 2) trust and reputation (providing assurance to users). Successful publishers generate powerful "liquidity" by measuring the attention time users spend on their platforms. This is why Upworthy measured success in "attention minutes," and why Elon Musk is obsessed with ensuring "users never regret a single minute" or "never regret a second" spent consuming content—put simply, making every second of content valuable and never disappointing.
For Publisher-Exchanges, the key is first establishing a compelling core experience that captures users’ time and commitment, then embedding asset issuance and transfer in a way that aligns with their uniquely generated engagement patterns.
We don’t view exchanges merely as trading venues, but rather as Athenian agoras—spaces where people interact and exchange experiences, value, and information within strictly defined, context-rich environments. With this in mind, we envision several broad application categories where Publisher-Exchanges are poised to emerge.
Communication Tools
Messenger apps are prime candidates to become Publisher-Exchanges.
An early example of this argument can be seen in WhatsApp and WeChat. Both platforms have rich developer ecosystems in India and China, built atop robust, nationally mandated digital payment infrastructures. This enables teams like Sama and Meesho to directly embed AI labeling and local e-commerce labor markets into the contextual status of users’ social graphs on these platforms.
In crypto, Telegram is the de facto messaging app, and its bot API opens up a vast design space for embedding issuance and value exchange experiences. Products like Dialect Operator and Maestro exemplify this idea. They demonstrate that users want to transact directly within their chats. These Telegram trading bots qualify as Publisher-Exchanges because they bundle discovery and intent with execution, closing the loop between attention and value transfer. Telegram even has its own hidden app store (go to search and type “tapps”), featuring hundreds of bots that let users send payments, play games, discover content, and more.
While these Publisher-Exchange bots help reduce execution time for retail traders seeking high-yield opportunities in closed chat groups, there’s further opportunity to vastly expand the range of assets that can be issued and traded. We expect chat groups to become foundational layers for new forms of work (getting paid for tasks completed directly in chat), special projects (crowdfunding new initiatives within large conversations), and entertainment (launching memecoins as casually as sending a GIF)—all as Publisher-Exchange experiences.
The largest social media apps on content networks (Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube) are content markets where music creators, posters, video makers, or other UGC creators compete for user attention. Creators then leverage the attention they’ve accumulated to sell content or branded products.
The north star for crypto content networks is direct audience support for individual creators or specific pieces of content, where creators receive a significant share of revenue from what they create. This was the original thesis behind creator tokens, but we’ve found that if creator tokens are decoupled from the platforms where their audiences reside, they’re unlikely to succeed on their own.
We’re now seeing early experiments with new types of content networks, each issuing and trading new kinds of assets within their apps. We envision a new kind of content market where users come for entertainment but stay for the market.
Unlonely is a streaming platform that directly embeds token issuance and prediction games into streams and chats. Farcaster Frames are another example, enabling on-chain interactions directly within feeds, opening up infinite possibilities for issuing and trading assets in familiar settings.
Today, most content networks monetize user attention through display advertising. Ad-based customer acquisition models typically suffer from poor funnel conversion and are explicitly suboptimal because they often interrupt the user experience—users know they’re being marketed to.
Display advertising is a relic from the pre-crypto era. A more fundamental approach for businesses to acquire users is Direct Value Issuance (DVI)—paying users directly in tokens.
Advertisers should be able to distribute value directly to users instead of serving targeted ads based on user behavior or demographics. A content network doesn’t need to insert an ad for a sports betting platform between posts in an NBA live-streaming feed—instead, it could allow the sportsbook to directly airdrop $50 worth of credit to users.
Instead of advertisers transacting through platforms as rent-seeking intermediaries, they would hand their customer acquisition budgets directly to end users. In turn, content markets can offer users a superior product: shifting from places where attention is actively mined without users seeing resulting benefits (via display ads), to environments where users earn and spend assets based on their attention patterns and are directly involved in the financialization process (via DVI).
Embedding back-end ad networks might be even more compelling—by giving every user an address, apps can costlessly embed universal financial services into deeply existing user interactions.
Information Markets
Search engines in the 1990s aimed to organize information on the internet, initially focusing on static web pages, then expanding to new media and content formats. Initially, access to this information was subsidized through advertising.
Today, information on the internet extends far beyond web pages—it’s scattered across thousands of forum posts, group chats, podcasts, and private databases. Information markets (e.g., prediction markets, sports betting platforms, alternative data providers) are ways for users to extract signals from noise across all these sources, distilling probabilistic outcomes from vast qualitative data.
Although the most successful information markets today don’t rely on crypto rails, we believe they can be strengthened using crypto primitives. The design space involves either financializing information itself based on quality, or embedding these markets directly into first-party information-sharing environments.
Prediction markets like Polymarket are effectively binary call options on future outcomes (e.g., elections or sports events). Historically, they’ve failed to accumulate sufficient liquidity or attention to serve as reliable information sources. In contrast, cultural assets like memecoins or NFTs have proven to attract higher attention (and informational value) than closed prediction markets because they lack fixed expiration dates and can develop their own lifecycles. For instance, trading volume for Trump-related NFTs and tokens has consistently exceeded that of Polymarket’s prediction markets.
Thus, new types of spot assets that directly track attention may represent better proxies for attention or information flow. Embedding such assets into news publishing platforms or editorial publishers could be more compelling than past binary, fixed-expiry constructs. Just as Numerai borrows from token-curated registries to run machine learning competitions on obfuscated financial data, we believe similar principles can be used to build general-purpose information markets for new categories of information.
Imagine a StackExchange-style forum where voting and reputation primitives carry financial value, or a Pinterest-style curation board where users can stake their reputation on emerging trends and behaviors. The internet today hosts vast amounts of high-quality information, mostly contributed by users without any financial incentive—the missing piece is proper aggregation and monetization, precisely where crypto primitives are most useful.
We’re excited by new expressions of this argument, and more broadly, by tokenizing intangible quantities within content networks: accuracy, reputation, humor.
Communities of Specialized Interest
Tokens allow communities to focus on novel problems and direct resources toward them. ConstitutionDAO proved that a memecoin could pool enough funds to bid on a rare artifact, and after the auction ended, the network itself became active.
The key takeaway here is that when tokens are attached to a mission, they’re more likely to coordinate real-world action. This collaborative funding model can support novel ventures typically overlooked by traditional financing and research channels: for example, capital-intensive projects like VR headsets, niche open-source software, art spaces, or drug discovery for rare diseases.
Tokens uniquely facilitate capital formation from distributed sources and grant strong ownership rights to capital providers over the resulting outputs. This means groups worldwide can coordinate capital to conduct large-scale experiments, commercialize results, and return profits to token holders.
HairDAO and VitaDAO are current examples of this. We’ve already seen new platforms for collaborative research funded and sustained by attention accumulated around various neglected issues.
An Infinite Trading Canvas
Consumer crypto applications will represent a generative shift, not an imitative one. The tight link we’ve described in this article—between crypto-native attention, capital formation, and coordination—is possible because crypto’s main unlock is that trading can happen anywhere. Rather than simply moving existing economies on-chain, crypto unlocks a new economy of attention, enabling like-minded groups to exchange minutes for dollars, and vice versa.
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