Publisher-Exchanges: Consumer Applications and the Attention Theory of Value
“Information is money, money is information.” This article is sourced from Shayon Sengupta’s article “Publisher-Exchanges: Consumer Applications and the Attention Theory of Value,” compiled and written by Block Unicorn.
(Prior context:
Interview with the father of blockchain: Blockchain is born for NFTs, not cryptocurrency
)
(Supplementary background:
6 ways to invest in Bitcoin in 2024, recommended by Bankless for beginners
)
Table of Contents:
Publisher-Exchanges
Emerging categories of Publisher-Exchanges
Communication tools
Information market
Professional interest communities
Infinite trading canvas
“The price is the news” is a saying often used in the cryptocurrency community, quoted whenever there is rapid price volatility on the internet, leading to increased participation and attention. However, I have found that the reverse statement of this phrase may be even more profound: “The news is the price.”
In my contribution to “Multicoin’s Expectations for 2024,” I described the apparent changes in asset pricing and named it the “Attention Theory of Value.” In the crypto space, the primary input for asset pricing is not based on a multifactor model revolving around risk premiums or cash flows, but rather the perceived amount of time, energy, and capital invested by a community around an asset. It is important to note that this is not a prescriptive statement, but an observation of the historical flow of funds into token assets.
The internet enables arbitrary and bidirectional information transmission. Cryptocurrencies are built upon this foundation, enabling arbitrary and bidirectional value transfer. Today’s consumer internet, including streaming platforms, online media, mobile applications, and social media, can be summed up as an attention market. As a result, money and attention are becoming increasingly similar in nature.
In the 1930s, Benjamin Graham had to wait for quarterly reports and financial statements to express his value investing theory through human brokers purchasing paper stock certificates. In 2020, news about hedge funds shorting GameStop spread across various corners of the Reddit community, attracting thousands of retail investors on Robinhood to buy GameStop stocks, causing the stock price to surge 15 times within 30 days—fighting against hedge funds and blowing up their positions (retail investors versus Wall Street). The consumer internet and crypto infrastructure have made the fundamental units of information and value smaller (Block Unicorn’s note: When information continues to shrink, price differences in the market will be eliminated), while increasing the volume and frequency of data consumption and value transactions. With the development of this trend, the Attention Theory of Value becomes even more closely linked—information is money, money is information.
Although the market of attention and value exists in reality, we have not yet truly seen their collision. When we think about crypto consumer applications, this is what we are looking for. Crypto enables the rapid creation of new assets around attention and transactions in places where such attention is gathered: consumer applications.
In the coming years, we expect consumer developers to intentionally incorporate cryptocurrencies into the structure and user experience of their applications, significantly changing the scope of tradable content and trading venues. Internally, we refer to these types of applications as “Publisher-Exchanges.”
Block Unicorn’s note: “Publisher-Exchanges” refers to the release and trading of content on Web3 social platforms, allowing users to release content, attract attention, facilitate transactions, and benefit from them.
Exchanges naturally have product-market fit in the crypto space because one of the core purposes of cryptocurrencies is value transfer. Coinbase (fiat exchange and centralized exchange), Tensor (digital collectible exchange), Jito (intent trading and blockspace exchange), and Phantom (order flow exchange) are all different forms of exchanges.
In the crypto space, exchanges hold a similar position to major publishers in the consumer internet (e.g., X, Instagram, and The New York Times): publishers control the flow of attention on the consumer internet, while exchanges control the flow of funds in the crypto space.
As we think about the next generation of consumer applications, we expect to blur the boundaries between exchanges and publishers, creating a new experience that combines currency and attention.
Kyle (Multicoin CEO) wrote about UI layer composability in his contribution for 2024. The simplified implication of this argument is that the next major online exchange will not have traditional order books and depth charts like Coinbase. Instead, it will resemble a short-form video application, 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 through their taste. In other words, consumer applications, through the unique capabilities of crypto, become both publishers and exchanges: Publisher-Exchanges.
Publisher-Exchanges increase the surface area of new asset issuance by embedding issuance and native trading into the frontend of applications, allowing for novel interactions and coordination of these assets. Introducing trading in familiar places may seem narrow or simulated, but we believe narrow markets are the beginning of discovering emerging behaviors that will lead to the birth of massive new platforms.
This will be a golden age of experimentation—a blank slate for developers to experiment with combining native issuance and trading with new application experiences. “Crypto-native consumer applications” will be treated as first-class citizens based on these design principles.
The goal of Publisher-Exchanges is to trade simultaneously with the content users are interested in at any given moment, meeting their needs. The next generation of consumer applications in the crypto space will allow users to locally issue and trade assets, directly monetizing the attention they capture.
For founders looking to build Publisher-Exchanges, we believe there are some design principles from the history of publishers and exchanges that are relevant.
In the history of the consumer internet, publishers are essentially content markets, and markets are driven by two core attributes: 1) discovery and curation (presenting users with content they want to see and interact with) and 2) trust and reputation (providing guarantees to users). Successful publishers generate strong “liquidity” by measuring the amount of attention users spend on them. This is why Upworthy measures success in “attention minutes” and why Elon Musk is obsessed with “making every minute of content users see valuable” and “making every second of content users see valuable”—in other words, ensuring that every moment of content users see is valuable and does not leave them feeling regretful.
For publisher-exchanges, the key is to first establish an engaging core experience that captures users’ time and commitment, and then embed asset issuance and transfer in a way that aligns with their unique modes of engagement.
We do not simply view exchanges as trading venues but as Athenian markets, where people interact and exchange experiences, value, and information in a rigorously defined, context-specific environment. With this in mind, we envision several broad application categories that we believe present opportunities for the emergence of Publisher-Exchanges.
Messenger applications are prime candidates for becoming 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 on top of robust, government-regulated digital payment infrastructures. This enabled teams like Sama and Meesho to directly embed AI-tagged and hyperlocal merchant labor marketplaces into the contextual fabric of users’ social graphs on these platforms.
In the crypto space, Telegram is the de facto messaging application, and their bot API creates a broad design space for embedding issuance and value exchange experiences. Examples include Dialect Operator and MAestro is an example of this perspective. They demonstrate that users want to conduct transactions directly in their chats. These Telegram trading bots fit the definition of publisher exchanges because they bundle discovery and intent with execution, closing the loop between attention and value transfer. Telegram has its own hidden app store (go to search, then type “tapps”) with hundreds of bots that allow users to send payments, play games, discover content, and more.
Although these publisher exchange bots are used to shorten the execution time for retail traders searching for high returns in closed chat groups, there is further potential to significantly increase the range of assets that can be issued and traded. We envision chat groups becoming the foundation layer for new forms of work (completing tasks and getting rewarded directly in chats), special projects (crowdfunding new initiatives in large conversations), and entertainment (issuing memecoins like sending gifs), all within the experience of publisher exchanges.
The largest social media applications of content networks (Instagram, TikTok, X, Youtube) are content markets where creators of music, posts, videos, or other user-generated content compete for users’ attention. Creators can then leverage the attention they accumulate to sell content or branded products.
The North Star of encrypted content networks is audience support for individual creators or content snippets, where creators earn a significant share of revenue from their created content. This was the original theory of creator tokens, but we found that if these creator tokens are detached from the platforms where their audience resides, they may not be successful on their own.
We are now seeing early experiments of a new type of content network, where each network issues and trades new types of assets within their applications. We envision a new content market where users come for entertainment but stay for the market.
Unlonely is a streaming platform that directly integrates token issuance and prediction games into streaming and chats. Farcaster Frames is another example that enables direct interaction in on-chain states, allowing for the issuance and trading of assets within familiar places, providing endless opportunities.
Today, most content networks monetize users’ attention through display ads. Ad-based customer acquisition models often suffer from poor funnel conversion rates and are explicitly a suboptimal solution as they frequently interrupt the user experience; users realize they are being marketed to.
Display ads are relics from the pre-cryptocurrency era. The fundamental principle for merchants to acquire users is through Direct Value Issuance (DVI) – paying users directly with tokens.
Advertisers should be able to distribute value directly to users, rather than targeting ads based on user behavior/demographics. A content network doesn’t need to place an ad about a sports betting platform between posts in a user’s scroll through a live NBA game – instead, it can allow the sports betting platform to airdrop $50 worth of credits directly to the user.
Advertisers are no longer transacting through platforms as intermediaries for rent, but rather directly allocating their customer acquisition budgets to end users. In turn, content markets can offer superior products to their users: they transition from places where their attention is actively mined and the resulting benefits are not seen (via display ads) to earning and spending assets based on their attention patterns and have direct access to that financialization process (via DVI).
The embedded advertising network backdoor may be even more intriguing – by providing an address for each user, it enables applications to embed general financial services at no cost, which can be added to users’ existing deep interactions.
Search engines in the 90s were dedicated to organizing information on the internet, initially focusing on static webpages and then expanding to new forms of media and content. The initial cost of accessing this information was subsidized through ads.
Today, information on the internet extends far beyond webpages – it is distributed 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 filter signals rather than noise directly from all these sources and distill probabilistic outcomes from a large amount of qualitative information.
While the most successful information markets currently do not rely on the crypto rails, we believe they can be strengthened through cryptographic primitives. The design space is either financializing information itself based on quality or directly embedding these markets into places where first-party information sharing takes place.
Prediction markets like Polymarket are effectively binary call options around future outcomes such as elections or sports events. Historically, they have failed to accumulate enough liquidity or attention to serve as reliable information sources. In contrast, cultural assets like meme coins or NFTs have proven to have higher attention (and information volume) than closed prediction markets because they lack fixed expiration dates and can have their own life cycle. For example, trading volumes for NFTs and tokens related to Trump have consistently been higher than those of Polymarket prediction markets.
Therefore, the new type of spot assets that directly track attention may represent proxies for attention or information flow. Embedding these types of assets into news release platforms or editorial publishers may be more attractive than past binary, fixed-term structures. Just as Numerai derives from the token-curated registry principle where machine learning competitions are run on obscured financial data, we believe a general information market for new categories of information can be built on the same principle.
Imagine a forum similar to StackExchange where votes and reputation primitives have financial value, or a curation board similar to Pinterest where users can stake their reputation on emerging trends and behaviors. There is a wealth of high-quality information on the internet today, much of it contributed by users without any financial incentive – what is lacking is the proper aggregation and monetization forms, which is where cryptographic primitives can be most useful.
We are excited about this new manifestation of the argument, and overall, we are excited about tokenizing intangible quantities in content networks: accuracy, reputation, humor.
Tokens allow communities to focus on novel questions and direct resources towards them. ConstitutionDAO demonstrated that a memecoin can pool enough funds to bid on a rare artifact and the network itself became active after the auction ended.
The key in this case is that when tokens attach to a mission, they are more likely to coordinate real-world actions. This collaborative funding model can support new ventures that are often overlooked by traditional financing and research avenues: capital-intensive projects such as VR headsets, niches in open-source software, art spaces, or drug discovery for rare diseases.
Tokens uniquely facilitate capital formation from decentralized sources and empower capital providers with strong ownership over the products of that capital. This means that groups from all over the world can coordinate capital to conduct large-scale experiments, commodify the results of these experiments, and return the profits to token holders.
HairDAO and VitaDAO are examples of this current state. We have seen new platforms emerge for collaborative research, funded and sustained by attention accumulated around various overlooked issues.
Consumer-facing crypto applications will be generative transformations, not mimetic ones. The tight connection between native crypto attention, capital formation, and coordination that we described in this post is because the primary unlock of crypto is that transactions can happen anywhere. Rather than simply porting existing economies onto chains, crypto unlocks new economic primitives around attention, allowing like-minded groups to convert minutes into dollars and vice versa.