But the opportunity for Attention Assets goes far beyond pricing equities. We believe that predicting attention is an economically valuable activity. Attention is a leading indicator to consumer preferences and spending. Businesses allocate R&D, hiring, and marketing dollars depending on where attention goes. It is a matter of figuring out new... See more

The goal of an equities research analyst is to determine the price of a stock. There are established methods to calculate the DCF component but what about the memetic component? As more assets trade off of their memetic value, it will become necessary to develop methods to model memetic value. Sophisticated investors already use things like... See more

The most obvious tradeoff of our proposed oracle is that the inputs are difficult to obtain. If you want to construct a LeBron James attention oracle, you must first create many different liquid prediction markets for topics related to LeBron. In addition, those markets must stay liquid over time and be replaced with liquid markets as existing ones... See more

Coming back to our LeBron James example, let’s say you want to trade the attention of LeBron. To construct an Attention Oracle for him the first step would be to take in (or create if they don’t exist) many binary prediction markets for topics about LeBron, such as “Will LeBron James have over X million followers by the end of the month?”, “Will... See more

One observation of UGAs is that their prices typically start at zero. This is a feature rather than a bug because if you invent a new meme from scratch, the attention of that meme is zero at the time of creation. It intuitively makes sense that you can enter at a low price. This also allows people who are good at spotting trends early to monetize... See more

The traditional asset issuance process is slow, expensive and has a high regulatory bar, restricting what assets can be issued. Attention Assets must operate at Internet speed to keep pace with the global zeitgeist. The combination of permissionless tokens issuance, clever pricing mechanisms like bonding curves, and DEXs practically let anyone... See more

We believe that, with proper construction, Attention Assets could transcend to a bonafide asset class. To help accelerate this idea, this essay proposes the idea of Attention Oracles, a new oracle construction that could enable Attention Perps—novel instruments for traders to go long or short the attention of cultural fixtures.

In short, Attention... See more

At the risk of being overly succinct, there are broadly two types of assets:

1. Cash Flow Assets — primarily equities and bonds. These assets generate cash flows that investors assign value to.

2. Supply & Demand Assets — mostly applies to commodities and forex. Prices fluctuate based on supply and demand.

Recently, crypto has instigated a new type of... See more