Publisher-Exchanges: Consumer Applications and the Attention Theory of Value
“Information is money, and 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.
Table of Contents
Publisher-Exchanges
Emerging categories of Publisher-Exchanges
Messaging applications
Information markets
Professional interest communities
Infinite trading canvas
“The price is the news” is a commonly used saying in the cryptocurrency community. Whenever there is a rapid price fluctuation on the internet, leading to increased participation and attention, this phrase is often quoted. 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 2024: Expectations,” I described the significant changes in asset pricing methods, which I named the “Attention Theory of Value.” In the crypto space, the primary input for asset pricing is not based on a multifactor model involving risk premiums or cash flows but rather on the perceived quantity of time, energy, and capital invested by a community around an asset. It is important to note that this is not a normative statement but an observation of the historical flow of funds into token assets.
The internet has enabled arbitrary and bidirectional information transfer. Cryptocurrencies are built upon these foundations and facilitate arbitrary and bidirectional value transfer. Today’s consumer internet—streaming platforms, online media, mobile applications, social media, etc.—can be summarized as an attention market. As a result, money and attention share increasingly similar characteristics.
In the 1930s, Benjamin Graham had to wait for quarterly reports and financial statements to express his value investing theories by purchasing physical stock certificates through human brokers. In 2020, news about hedge funds shorting GameStop spread across various corners of the Reddit community, attracting thousands of retail investors to buy GameStop stocks on Robinhood. This led to a 15-fold price increase within 30 days, as retail investors fought against hedge funds and squeezed their positions (Retail vs. Wall Street). Consumer internet and crypto infrastructure have made information and value units smaller (Note from Block Unicorn: As information asymmetry decreases, market spreads also converge) 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 relevant—information is money, and money is information.
Although the markets for attention and value coexist in reality, we have not yet witnessed their collision. When thinking about crypto consumer applications, this is what we are looking for. Crypto enables the rapid creation of new assets around attention and facilitates trading in places where attention is aggregated: consumer-facing applications.
In the coming years, we expect consumer developers to intentionally incorporate cryptocurrencies into the structure and user experience of their applications, dramatically changing the range of content and trading venues. Internally, we refer to these applications as “Publisher-Exchanges.”
Block Unicorn 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 derive benefits.
Exchanges naturally have product-market fit in the crypto space because one of the core use cases of cryptocurrencies is value transfer. Coinbase (fiat exchange and centralized exchange), Tensor (digital collectibles exchange), Jito (intent trading and blockspace exchange), and Phantom (order flow exchange) are all different forms of exchanges in the crypto space.
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 aim to blur the boundaries between exchanges and publishers, creating new experiences that combine currency and attention.
In his contribution on the 2024 vision, Kyle (Multicoin CEO) wrote about the composability of the UI layer. The simplified meaning 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 app where users can bet on the virality of upcoming creator content, or a group chat where friends can instantly initiate NFT collections based on inside jokes or memes, or a curation platform in the style of are.na, where designers gain reputation and wealth based on their taste. In other words, through the unique features of crypto, consumer applications become both publishers and exchanges: Publisher-Exchanges.
Publisher-Exchanges increase the surface area for new asset issuance and allow for novel ways of interacting and coordinating these assets by embedding issuance and native trading in the frontend of applications. Introducing trading in familiar places may seem narrow or simulated, but we believe narrow markets are the starting point for discovering emerging behaviors, leading to the birth of substantial new platforms.
This will be a golden age of experimentation—a blank slate for developers to experiment with integrating 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 enable trading with the content that users are interested in at any given moment to meet 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 relevant to both publishers and exchanges from their historical backgrounds.
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 their platform. This is why Upworthy measures success in “attention minutes” and why Elon Musk is obsessed with “making users not regret every minute of content they see” and “not making users regret every second of content they see”—in other words, making every minute and second of content valuable and not repulsive to users.
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 marketplaces where people interact and exchange experiences, values, and information within strictly defined, context-specific environments. Considering this, we envision several broad application categories that we believe are ripe for the emergence of Publisher-Exchanges.
Messaging applications are prime candidates to become Publisher-Exchanges.
An early example of this argument can be seen in WhatsApp and WeChat. These platforms have rich developer ecosystems in India and China and are built on top of robust, government-regulated digital payment infrastructures. This enabled teams like Sama and Meesho to directly embed AI-powered tagging and local merchant e-commerce gig marketplaces into the contextual state of users’ social graphs on these platforms.
In the crypto space, Telegram is the de facto messaging app, and their bot API creates a vast design space for embedding issuance and value exchange experiences. Dialect Operator and MAestro is an example of this perspective. They demonstrate that users want to engage in direct transactions in their chats. These Telegram trading bots fit the definition of publisher exchanges because they bundle discovery, intent, and execution together, narrowing the loop between attention and value transfer. Telegram has its own hidden app store (go to search, then type “tapps”), with hundreds of bots allowing 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 looking 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 expect chat groups to become the foundational 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 of which are part of the publisher exchange experience.
The largest social media applications on the content network (Instagram, TikTok, X, Youtube) are content markets where creators compete for users’ attention with music, posts, videos, or other user-generated content. Creators can then leverage their accumulated attention to sell content or brand products.
The North Star of the crypto content network is supporting 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 have found that if these creator tokens are disconnected from the platforms where their audience is, they may not succeed on their own.
Today, we are seeing early experiments with new forms of the content network, where each network issues and trades new types of assets within applications. We envision a new type of content market where users come for entertainment but stay for the marketplace.
Unlonely is a streaming platform that integrates token issuance and prediction games directly into streaming and chat. Farcaster Frames is another example, enabling direct interactions and embedding assets in food on-chain, providing limitless opportunities for issuing and trading assets in familiar places.
Currently, most content networks monetize users’ attention through display ads. Ad-based customer acquisition models often suffer from poor funnel conversion and are clearly suboptimal solutions as they frequently interrupt the user experience, making users aware that they are being marketed to.
Display ads are a relic of the pre-cryptocurrency era. The fundamental principle for merchants to acquire users is through direct value issuance (DVI), meaning directly paying users with tokens.
Advertisers should be able to distribute value directly to users instead of relying on targeted 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 NBA game livestream scroll – 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 directly allocating their customer acquisition budgets to end users. In turn, content markets can offer superior products to their users: transitioning from places where their attention is actively mined without seeing the benefits it generates (through display ads) to earning and spending assets based on their attention patterns, with direct participation in the financialization process (through DVI).
The embedded advertising network backdoors may be 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 engagements.
Search engines in the 90s focused on organizing information on the internet, initially focusing on static web pages and then expanding to new forms of media and content. Initially, access to this information was subsidized through advertisements.
Today, information on the internet extends far beyond web pages – it is distributed across thousands of forum posts, group chats, podcasts, and private databases. Information markets (such as prediction markets, sports betting platforms, alternative data providers) are ways for users to filter out signals rather than noise from all these sources and extract probabilistic outcomes from a large amount of qualitative information.
While the most successful information markets currently do not rely on crypto railroads, we believe they can be enhanced by cryptographic primitives. The design space is either to financialize information itself based on quality or to directly embed these markets into places of first-party information sharing.
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 sources of information. In contrast, cultural assets like memecoins or NFTs have proven to have higher attention (and information volume) than closed prediction markets, as they don’t have fixed expiration dates and can have their own lifecycles. For example, trading volumes of NFTs and tokens related to Trump have consistently been higher than those of Polymarket prediction markets.
Therefore, new types of spot assets that directly track attention or information flow may represent proxies more interested in attention or information flow. Embedding these types of assets into news release platforms or editorial publishers may be more appealing than previous binary, fixed-term structures. Just as Numerai borrowed from token-curated registries in running machine learning competitions on obfuscated financial data, we believe a general information market can be built for new categories of information based on the same principles.
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 that is contributed by users without any financial motivation – what is lacking is proper aggregation and monetization, which is where cryptographic primitives can be most useful.
We are excited about the new manifestations of this argument, which ultimately involve tokenizing intangible qualities in the content network: accuracy, reputation, humor.
Tokens allow communities to focus on novel questions and direct resources towards them. ConstitutionDAO proved 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 are attached to a mission, they are more likely to coordinate real-world action. This collaborative funding model can support new ventures that are often overlooked by traditional financing and research channels, such as capital-intensive projects like VR headsets, corners of 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 capital product. This means that groups from around the world can coordinate capital for large-scale experiments, commodify the results of these experiments, and return the proceeds to token holders.
HairDAO and VitaDAO are examples of this current state. We have already seen new platforms for collaborative research funded and sustained by attention accumulated around various overlooked issues.
Consumer crypto applications will be generative transformations, not imitative ones. The tight connection between crypto-native attention, capital formation, and coordination described in this article is because the primary unlock of crypto is that transactions can happen anywhere. Instead of simply moving existing economies onto the chain, crypto unlocks a new economic layer of attention, where like-minded crowds can exchange minutes for dollars and vice versa.