Original author: sleepy.mid

Recently, Twitter has been flooded with posts, and I've seen many friends earning a good amount of airdrops by "talking up" Huma. In today's article, I will attempt to break down what is called InfoFi, explore what has created it, and what it has changed. With the emergence and popularity of Kaito, we can already see a paradigm shift occurring within the Web3 world.

In this transfer, "mouth play" airdrops have shifted from a fringe activity to a mainstream participation channel; "information output" has become a key element in building industry identity from content creation; and "narrative ability" is taking over the dominant position of "usage behavior" within the airdrop system. All of this points to the same trend: the attention structure is being restructured, information behavior is being financialized, and consensus is becoming a resource that can be manufactured.

1. The death of interactive airdrops began with its illusion

The logic of the old generation airdrop was like this: "We create a product, design the interaction, and distribute tokens to early users. This can cultivate their usage habits and form user retention." This logic established what seemed to be a reasonable positive expectation between 2018 and 2022, but today it has collapsed:

· A large number of interaction addresses are script behaviors and do not represent real user intent; · The project launches with an airdrop, the airdrop is the delivery, and users can take short-term arbitrage and exit immediately; The so-called "incentive retention" has become empty talk, and the data of the vast majority of projects has plummeted after airdrops.

You're counting on domesticating today's users with future expectations, but users don't believe in the future at all. What's more: Interactions are no longer scarce and no longer reflect the user's true intentions. The conclusion is obvious: an airdrop is never a cure for activating a product, it's just a drain blaster, good for letting the market know about you, but not for letting users stay.

As a result, the airdrop logic began to migrate, evolving from "Behavioral Finance" to "Information Finance": it's not what you do, it's what you say, who sees it, and how much social proliferation it brings. This is a shift in the value perception model and a re-understanding of the core drivers of the crypto world: in a Web3 world where consensus precedes products and narratives precede use, information is the original asset.

2. The Triple Logical Foundation of InfoFi

If we consider 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. However, InfoFi believes that the information behavior itself is the starting point for consensus generation. Every tweet, every meme, and every expression of opinion is an entry into consensus, creating the market memory of the future.

2) The Binding Mechanism of Personality and Identity

On-chain addresses are anonymous, but social behavior is not. InfoFi binds off-chain identities, modes of expression, and social reach capabilities to on-chain addresses, thereby forming a system of influence weight with personality traits. This increases the "accuracy rate" of airdrop distribution, breaking away from the old thinking of "interaction equals user."

3) Deep Coupling of Narrative Timing and Capital Release

The project's launch nodes are highly coupled with the peak of social discourse, equivalent to leveraging airdrops to stimulate early enthusiasm, igniting the attention dividend window, and forming a liquidity pivot. In this structure, "mouth mining" is no longer a cheap act, but a deep alignment with the logic of crypto consensus. To put it more bluntly: mouth mining 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 "mouth-based" logic, what you are staking is your identity, your opinions, and the social risks of voicing for a project, which is fundamentally no different from traditional participation methods. In fact, in the early stages, you have to bear even greater costs (you need to understand the project, produce content, and take on the risk of speech), making it a complete value creation path. When on-chain actions are mechanized and scripted, the mouth becomes the only input that still carries a personal touch. This is also why mouth-based participants can benefit from the preferential treatment of the InfoFi mechanism, as they provide social trust that cannot be forged by contracts.

Of course, there is also a large number of AI manuscript washing and airdrops, copying content, disguising opinions, and generating content farms in batches. This is a problem that the InfoFi project team needs to solve through model optimization and identity recognition mechanism.
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 the system to evolve further.

3. InfoFi is a positive response from Web3 to attention finance.

Let's contrast social media with another infrastructure that reaches users directly. Wallets are the cold-start layer, and social is the hot-start layer. The wallet represents the "right to operate", and social media represents the "right to speak". In this information-first, asset-lagging structure, all early adopters are forced to become "content distribution nodes". You are not promoting the project, you are creating a "consensus air layer" for the project's token release, which is not nothing, it is an information friction that provides legitimacy for capital flows.

InfoFi is building a mechanism where whoever creates more social friction for me, I give more leverage to whomever I can. Under this structure, "lip licking" is not an opportunistic shortcut, but a professional participation entrance to the social consensus mechanism. This is a sign of the participation of information as a financial asset in the relations of production. The rapid development of lip licking airdrops is a manifestation of the narrative itself becoming a product. The project is building the narrative, the user is participating in the narrative, the platform is identifying the narrative, and the token is carrying the narrative. In this on-chain society, the narrative is launched earlier than the product, and the content flows faster than the code. InfoFi is the crypto world's orthodox response to the financialization of attention, and jerking off is a natural way to engage, not a gray area. If the use is proof of participation, then the expression of information is proof of trust. If liquidity is the lifeblood of the market, then social voice is the source of that lifeblood.

IV. Next Steps for Development: Hyper-Individual Consensus Engineering, Information Becomes Organizational Assets

If you pay enough attention and delve deeper, you will find that it has already vaguely revealed the embryonic form of some industrial logic. A group of KOLs are no longer working solo but are participating in the narrative in an organized manner. The future airdrop narrative is no longer a random emergence of the group, but rather, like filming a drama, it will have clear thematic design, rhythm arrangement, and role division.

· The project's cold start phase is warming up; · The period before IDO is a buildup to the climax; · Launch day creates high-energy highlights; · After the airdrop is executed, organize a collective review and produce a successful narrative template.

We will see "content producers + topic organizers + social amplifiers + visual aesthetic curation" form a small communication DAO to launch a series of information battles in the form of collaboration. The most radical deduction is that the information itself will assume a part of the liquidity issuance function. In the past, Liquidity Bootstrapping emphasized the synergy of funds; In the future, there may be Info Bootstrapping, which determines the distribution ratio, price benchmark and even circulation window of the initial token through the depth and coverage of the narrative. Create a narrative first, and coins are just props for the climax of the plot. Information is no longer a medium to an asset, but a part of the asset minting process itself.

We are entering an era where narratives are structured and manufactured. In this era: those who can organize the expressions of more people will have stronger consensus-building capabilities; those who 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 chain.

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