Tokens in the attention economy

The best thrill traders are hunting for low relative popularity assets that have lots of space for their valuations to grow if they are able to cross the chasm from obscure to popular. They are selling them when ownership catches up with attention.

Keep in mind at this point $SOS has no product, no fundamentals, it is purely a market of speculative attention catalysed by the crowd’s desire for an OpenSea token or competitor.

Crypto assets are not really scarce either. Of course, this is a little intellectually dishonest. Bitcoin and Ethereum themselves are scarce due to their hard-cap supply or deflationary tokenomic designs; Crypto Punks are scarce because there is a finite and fixed supply; and yes, there will probably only ever be 5,200 Crypto Dickbutts. But the amo... See more

The recent airdrop of $SOS is good to consider. $SOS was airdropped by a third party to Opensea users based on their previous NFT buying history. This is interesting because giving virtually every single serious crypto “game player” some amount of free money is a very good way to rapidly increase attention amongst all crypto game players.

Yes, there’s only 10,000 Crypto Punks. But there’s also 10,000 BAYC, MAYC, the kennel one, a bunch of cool ArtBlocks and CoolCats and Meebits and Hashmasks and, yeah, you get the picture.

The rate of change of attention and the saturation of ownership are useful metrics to observe or estimate when valuing crypto assets or playing the massive multiplayer crypto trading video game.

Traditional companies will pay you $5-10 to use their product. Sign up, and you get $10 off your first Uber ride. In web3, the fight for attention is so large that 9-figure incentive programs are the new normal, and 5-figure airdrops to users are not uncommon. Crypto youtube influencers are commanding 5 to 6 figure advertising costs per video. Atte... See more

In reality, the only scarce resource in crypto is attention.