The War For Mindshare

Attention Markets

Memecoins are attention markets. It is a combination of a prediction market and an attention network (social media). It is a financial game with an (a)social element.

Prediction markets are related to exogenous events and tend to resolve. Memecoins are purely endogenous thus e.g. MAGA coin has a life of itself that could be loosely related to real-world success of MAGA, as Donald Trump being elected president, but not necessarily.

What it truly captures is current mindshare, the level of attention MAGA coin gets. Most importantly, it is a financialized mindshare or an onchain mindshare.

It is also a form of attention manipulation but instead of a clickbait – financial means are employed. Pumping a token to capture attention is a bet, perhaps a deceptive strategy, but anything goes in a war for mindshare.

Memecoins are the financialized equivalent of a social media post. Memecoins bundle distribution (advertisement) and a product into one. Memecoins is the new media.

Social media are attention networks that have grown asocial in recent years. It’s less about extracting dopamine through connecting to other people and more about extracting dopamine at any cost. Social graphs are much harder to farm for dopamine (and capital) than generic entertainment of up and down price movement.

The underlying unit of attention networks is social capital—the power of one’s reach. Social capital can be transformed into financial capital, as with a large audience, one can monetize the following.

The underlying unit of attention markets is financial capital - how much money is or could be made. It starts and ends with money. One can use attention networks to identify attention markets but the price is the news has never been more true than with memecoins.

This hyperfinancialization of attention is the purest form of monetization online. There is no need for an intermediary product such as an online course, white-labeled coffee mugs and other junk. There is also no social influence needed to monetize. One can attract others to a memecoin purely with financial capital.

It does help if one can shill a coin to a social network but numbers matter less. Capital is what matters as attention follows capital. In a sense, it is the purest form of social media. It’s purely and openly transactional.

As Taleb wrote “money and transactions purify relations; ideas and abstract matters like "recognition" and "credit" warp them, creating an atmosphere of perpetual rivalry”.

Memecoins are the fastest and digitally-native way to extract capital from attention. The value flows where attention goes. Indeed, attention is ephemeral. So is the value attached to it. Hence to monetize one usually has to make a profit earlier rather than later. Few memes have staying power. Rugs are a feature, not a bug.

There is no need to overcomplicate memecoins by attaching the label of nihilism. Memecoins are fundamentally indefinitely optimistic. It is a novel form of entertainment and the first onchain (a)social product-market fit.