The double-edged sword of KOL empowerment: heroes are made by the times under the trend of VC coin cashing out

Author: DefiOasis

When it comes to content mining, you may not be unfamiliar with it. In the past few years, well-known projects including Friend.tech have conducted in-depth explorations in the content mining scenario. Compared with other products in this field, Kaito focuses on Twitter. On the premise of paying attention to Web3-related discussions, Kaito focuses more on the relationship between projects and creators.

Looking back, Kaito's popularity caters to the needs of VC projects on the market. It can be said that it has reached cooperation with the top VC projects at the right time, and the king projects such as Berachain and Story have further raised the expectations of Kaito for Yappers. Under the creative incentives of projects such as Eigenlayer and Starknet, more project parties have become more and more concerned about content creators. It is foreseeable that giving back to early content contributors through airdrops and delegating marketing costs based on content quality and distribution effects are common operations.

The emergence of Kaito has brought more dividends to KOLs, and also provided an excellent research platform for VC coin project parties to cooperate with KOLs. But it is inevitable that while Kaito provides convenience for the above groups, it has also invisibly directed more resources to KOLs and head project parties, but has weakened the market share of professional institutions such as media, incubators or marketing companies to a certain extent. This may not be a 100% good thing for the long-term impact on the industry.In addition, its fundamental model of content mining has invisibly contributed to the phenomenon of "water for water" and "posting for mining", pushing the currency circle, which is already full of low-quality information, further towards the direction of "desertification", and the negative impact it brings cannot be underestimated.

Kaito Yaps: A win-win system for KOLs and VC projects

In the past, the main way to measure the influence of social media was to look at the number of fans and views, but the low cost of brushing led to the rampant spread of various "matrix accounts", which encroached on the living space of high-quality creators. The uneven quality of KOLs and the difficulty in unifying content standards have always been the pain points of the crypto industry.

In response to such problems, Kaito founder Yu Hu proposed the concept of "Total Value Distributed (TVD)" - the total value generated in the encrypted content ecosystem (content contributed by users, marketing investment by the project party, etc.) is reasonably and fairly distributed to creators based on the contributions of participants (content quality, interaction frequency, community influence), trying to change the existing KOL pattern and let high-quality creators get due rewards.

In response to this, Kaito adopted the "traffic-oriented + value-oriented" method, and intuitively ranked creators' social reputation through Yap points and the number of Smart Followers, helping project parties to find high-quality creators more accurately and provide quantifiable reference standards for airdrop allocation or marketing expenses.

Specifically, Kaito identifies users with certain influence and engagement as Smart Followers, and the number of Smart Followers that a KOL has can reflect their recognition in the community and the quality of the content produced by the KOL on Twitter. Yaps is a quantitative expression of the attention of a tweet. If a tweet is widely forwarded or liked, it can bring more Yaps to the publisher, indicating that it has attracted enough attention.

To obtain Yaps points, users need to log in to Kaito and bind Twitter first, and then post cryptocurrency-related content on Twitter. Kaito's AI will analyze these tweets in real time or regularly, and distribute Yaps points according to the popularity of the content and the interactive data of influential posts (such as likes, comments, and forwarding).

Kaito Yaps points went viral on Twitter after it was launched in December last year. First, Jasonj Zhao, the founder of Story Protocol, said on Twitter many times that Kaito brought the "InfoFi" revolution and other crypto celebrities participated in the discussion in disguised form. Then, Berachain, Monad, Eclipse and other Pre-TGE head projects entered the Yapper Leaderboard, triggering users' competitive psychology to be on the list. With the help of big V's spontaneous publicity, it was re-spread. For a time, it seemed that a revolution to reshape the crypto content ecosystem was about to come, ushering in a new era of content mining.

In order to prevent the flooding of points due to a large number of water-injected posts and ensure that Yaps can reflect real attention rather than false data, Kaito has launched a set of Shadow ban anti-cheating system. Duplicate content and low-quality posts may be labeled as Shitposter and Copy Pasta; accounts that post meaningless water articles for a long time will even be directly kicked out of Kaito's list. In simple terms, the basis for creators to obtain Yaps is to publish valuable and Web3-related content, and their own influence and subsequent dissemination effects are weighted items.

From the perspective of creators, Yap's points mechanism encourages KOLs to actively share their insights on the project to obtain token rewards, so that creators hope to enter the top of the list or become the Inner Circle, and obtain airdrop incentives from VC projects in the future, thus forming a positive cycle of "high-quality content obtains Yaps-attracts more attention-improves ranking on the list-obtains airdrops or cooperation opportunities from the project party-incentives for re-creation". At present, 0G Labs, ANIME, and Quai have officially announced that they will announce relevant airdrops to Kaito Yapper during TGE.

In addition to the application scenarios for evaluating the influence and quality of KOLs, Kaito can also provide traders with an alternative greed index reference. Mindshare reflects the attention of the current community, similar to Google Trends in social media. For example, in the recent hot AI track, we can use Kaito's AI rankings to understand the popularity of AI Agent and Dev.

It is not difficult to see that Kaito has become more of an intermediary connecting creators and project parties, providing an important platform for marketing and project promotion for project parties. Its advantages are mainly reflected in its cooperation with leading project parties.Creators can participate and contribute content to the platform through a points system. The stickiness and uniqueness of this participation depend more on the attractiveness brought by Kaito's cooperation with VC projects. Its core competitiveness is amplified through cooperation with leading projects such as Story Protocol, Movement, and Monad.

These projects choose to cooperate with Kaito not only because its technology can provide quantification of creators' influence, but also because Kaito's "Yap-to-Earn" mechanism can encourage creators to contribute high-quality content and attention to these projects. For example, the founder of Story Protocol explicitly stated that "Yap = IP", implying that Kaito's points system is directly linked to project incentives. This cooperation model creates a unique market positioning for Kaito.

For VCs, while evaluating the community activity and real user scale through Kaito's Mindshare, they can also analyze the user composition based on the user group portraits divided in the list - such as Casual and Hardcore, Shitposter and Curator, Copy Pasta and Creative - to more accurately weigh the investment value of the project.

Yapper Launchpad

If Yaps encourages creators to actively farm, then Kaito Connect's latest product Yapper Launchpad

encourages project parties to farm in order to enter Yaps's Pre-TGE Community Leaderboard, thereby increasing exposure and helping cold starts.

With the above list as the driving force, the project party needs users and creators to screen and enter the Kaito instrument list, that is, the project party itself needs to improve the quality of the project to encourage creators to spontaneously market it on social media. If the project can use Kaito's influence to gain attention, even if the popularity is mediocre, there is still a chance to go viral. It can reward creators through bribery promises to enter the Pre-Tge Leadboard, indirectly providing Yappers with a second cash-out opportunity in addition to airdropping Kaito tokens. Currently, some project owners such as Lombard and Skate have issued rewards to voting supporters.

From the actual effect, except for the first round of battles between MegaETH and 0G Labs due to the initial scarcity and uncertainty of rules, Yapper Launchpad has received mediocre response since then. When the voting cycle of Yapper Launchpad (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) and the rules for going online on the Leaderboard after 7 days were announced, the attraction brought by this scarcity disappeared, and project owners no longer had to compete and only had to wait, and no longer had FOMO.

This Launchpad model is doomed to have a "popularity bias". Projects with more influential users or a certain degree of popularity are more likely to stand out, while small and medium-sized projects with real potential may be ignored. For projects that are already strong, there is no need for additional incentives to pay for Yappers to be on the list; when bribery is also used, it is also a dimensionality reduction attack on small and medium-sized projects.

The bigger problem is that when Kaito encourages project farming, there is no direct incentive mechanism for the project parties, and it eventually becomes a channel to help creators realize their influence; without controlling the frequency of new releases and clarifying the elimination mechanism, the Laucnhpad projects are mixed, and the quality of the Leadboard projects cannot be guaranteed.

Opposition

Although Kaito brought many benefits to the community in the early stage, with the passage of time, criticisms about the platform have gradually increased, mainly focusing on several aspects:

Language bias:Although Kaito claims to use the LLM model and there is no difference in the weights of different languages, it is an indisputable fact that the current proportion of Chinese-speaking promoters in the top 500 of the Yaps ranking is small. In order to increase Yaps, many Chinese-speaking creators publish content in both Chinese and English;

Influence bias:In the final analysis, Kaito is still focused on analyzing attention, but Yaps only covers mid-level creators, and the tail KOLs with a very small fan base are basically out of the picture. Even many high-quality creators with few followers have long had 0 points and are basically ignored. This bias in influence also leads to an imbalance in the allocation of points, forming a "Matthew effect", where Yaps eventually concentrate on top creators, and their number far exceeds that of mid-level creators.

It is worth noting that although Kaito has been criticized for the large gap in points between different Yappers, according to the airdrop feedback from different bloggers, this "Matthew effect" is not reflected in the final Kaito airdrop distribution, and the expected gap is mainly concentrated in the top Yappers.

Does not support company or institutional accounts:Although Kaito has launched a relatively reasonable influence quantification tool for the KOL group, it does not cover the social media accounts of major project parties or companies in the industry, and can only provide inspection tools for the KOL group. However, in fact, media organizations, VCs, project parties, etc. also need influence quantification.

Kaito's model of empowering KOLs alone ultimately results in more and more project parties having powerful tools to examine KOL groups, but being unable to conduct a thorough influence examination of media organizations, incubators, or other types of potential friendly companies. This will prompt more project parties to become dependent on KOLs, because they know which KOLs are reliable, but are unable to perceive which media or organizations are more reliable. Over time, the project parties will further focus their attention on KOLs rather than more professional organizations.

Accelerating the desertification of the cryptocurrency circle: Some people believe that the emergence of Kaito has quantified the influence of KOLs, and used Yaps as a carrot to drive KOLs to produce content crazily. In terms of business model, the ranking project parties are forced to conduct marketing on Mindshare to influence KOLs to output soft articles for the project.

As a result, Kaito has filled Twitter, the open environment for cryptocurrency discussion, with more noise. Kols, driven by Yaps and the project team through Kaito airdrops, have created a large number of soft articles. Natural and spontaneous technical discussions and application innovations have been further drowned by advertisements, and the signal-to-noise ratio has been greatly reduced for retail investors to obtain information.

This process is similar to desertification. As depicted in the movie Dune, the KOLs with increasing influence are like giant sandworms in the dunes. The sandworms absorb water, exhaust the original ocean water, and kill other species with thirst. The poisonous water released by themselves will poison other organisms and turn the environment into an environment suitable only for the growth of sandworms.

This phenomenon has been staged on WeChat. Fewer and fewer people spend time browsing Moments because there are more and more friends with work relationships on WeChat, which is full of advertisements from friends forced by work. There are fewer and fewer contents about the lives and emotions of real friends, and the density is getting lower and lower. Around the Spring Festival, Berachain, Story and others distributed a considerable amount of airdrops to Yappers. After Kaito announced its economic model and hinted at airdrops, discussions about Kaito reached an emotional high point. For a time, a large number of AI-generated long articles, spam and "scoring" behaviors flooded Twitter, especially Pre-TGE-related project content, which became the hardest hit area. In addition, there was a precedent of negative tweets being removed from the list. Overfarm was basically a "licking" tweet about the project. The phenomenon of a large amount of low-quality content flooding but unable to be effectively eradicated ultimately went against Kaito's original intention.

Summary: Times make heroes

From the perspective of business model, Kaito adopts the business model of "C-end volume" and "B-end subscription". From the perspective of the user end, Kaito attempts to create a flywheel of "user sharing data - getting rewards - attracting more users - enhancing data value - enhancing platform attractiveness". Its goal of pursuing network effects is not wrong. Google search relies on massive user data to form algorithm advantages, making the value of the data platform directly related to the number of users and activity. The more users there are, the richer the data accumulation.

One ​​of the reasons why the project party pays for the expensive annual fee of Kaito Pro is that Kaito attracted a large number of users to participate in the early stage and formed a certain user scale. On the premise of having a large amount of user data, it can more accurately and quickly meet marketing needs such as advertising and cooperation ambassadors. But before TGE, Kaito users excessively participated in content mining in pursuit of rewards, which eventually seriously diluted the true value of the data.

In addition, excellent data platforms like Dune Analytics and Nansen can also attract users and institutions to use them, but don’t ignore that data tools are replaceable. Old tools will be challenged by the emergence of new tools with lower subscription fees and better practicality. However, the current leading project parties are providing large airdrops and priority access to Yappers, which is Kaito’s differentiated advantage.

Overall, Kaito’s success has hit the cash-out trend of VC projects in the past two years. Kaito PRO, Kaito Connect and Kaito Yap are strongly related to VC projects. In addition, the project parties have a tradition of airdropping to KOLs and communities. Kaito has followed this trend of the times and divided the reference indicators of creator rewards in a more reasonable way from the perspective of content and creator quality. It can be said that it is a standard "time creates heroes". As long as the cash-out trend of VC projects does not end, this kind of farming behavior across the entire network will not stop.