Many of the most successful cryptoassets trade on attention rather than fundamental performance.

In this way, their fates progress similarly to that of Nike or Hermes, Kai Cenat or Kylie Jenner. They sell feelings. When consumers see an identity trending in the right direction, they buy. When they don't, they sell.

As users, we play momentum games with culture.

Of course, dollar volumes make markets tradeable. Having lots of wealth in one place brings deep liquidity, resistance to manipulation, and a wide selection of derivatives. But, in crypto today, wealth drives both market quality and social content—"the price is the news", as they say. Here, markets are irrelevant until they concentrate wealth—because, until then—no one can make or lose large amounts of money in them.

But, if tokens are consumer brands—and especially if tokens are media—this is a recipe for disaster. And disaster is what we have—a social culture stuck looping around the theory of money and vacant animal memes. To put it lightly, this is not what's on most people's minds when they open Instagram.

Our situation is not so different from a pre-internet era of cultural production—when musicians, filmmakers, & writers needed a stamp from industry gatekeepers in order to get distribution. If the internet taught us anything, it's that a large number of people—regular, everyday, ordinary people—can vastly outperform a select few at setting cultural trends that are lovable, shareable, and worthy of attention.

Let me offer a simple illustration. Social media usage rates differ—based on income—by no more than ~2x across any platform. On the consumer internet, distribution algorithms hunt for content stickiness, so everyone on earth has roughly the same budget to shine attention on digital media.

Comparatively, the average U.S. household in the top 0.1% has ~2900x more wealth than the average household in the bottom 50%  ($149m vs $51k), and the wealthiest 0.1% own ~2x the total wealth. (As a reference—wealth among Bitcoin holders is slightly more unequal than wealth among U.S. households).

When dollars move attention, quality signals get extremely distorted by the wealthy. It turns out, 'professional' traders are not good at making content for the rest of us. After all, why should whales care about developing token identities when they can orchestrate pumps on an infinite supply of copy-pasted dog memes? We're left with markets that are so ideologically insular they alienate the bulk of everyday consumers.

I believe there's a good way to fix this.

At their core, blockchains let us commoditize abstractions. We can put ideas in code and make markets for them. This product experience is deeply affected by market integrity—no one wants to trade size on an asset that gets flipped by five people in a Discord—and today we use wealth to make these sorts of safety guarantees.

But, crucially, this product experience doesn't require specific source material. In other words, we can use something besides dollars to make market outcomes robust. Namely, personhood. By measuring human attention flows, we can get market integrity from concentrations of attention as opposed to concentrations of wealth.

This will open the door for new markets—nonfictional markets—that don't need a large value base to be tradeable. Not only can these markets better fit consumer preferences, they're more fraud-proof, provide more information value, and put the industry in a better position to compete with the consumer internet.

Proof of Personhood gives us an economically secure way to bring public attention flows onchain. The specifics don't matter too much here—let's say every verified human can spend up to 100 units of attention per day. We call these units 'Energy,' and users spend them via a UX that looks like a hybrid between polling and prediction markets.

For example, we could have a Trump/Kamala market where users spend Energy volumes of their choosing on either candidate. Looking back on any period of time, we can say, for example, "Trump's Energy flows were X, while Kamala's Energy flows were Y." This gives us a basic infrastructure for measuring public attention flows onchain.

At this point, there's not much reason to believe anyone would care to use this. The following is the simplest distillation of how to fix that problem:

These markets will be more inviting to the average user and provide much more useful information than store-of-value token markets today, since they can easily be mapped onto non-cryptonative people, events, ideas, and memes.

Moving forward, one can imagine markets for more complex derivatives across any time horizon. And, at scale, there are ways in which these markets provide more useful information than prediction markets, or provide information where prediction markets cannot.

For example, a futures market featuring prominent public figures would offer estimates on the longevity of their popularity. This could help companies make marketing and partnership decisions. I've been calling these sentiment markets, since they directly price public opinion, rather than speculate on the outcome of some potentially arbirary and manipulable resolution event.

Of course, this also offers users a true play-to-earn product experience, where markets pay users for a vital production input—verifiable, public attention flows.