TL;DR:
The Problem: Memecoins proved that internet attention is valuable, but trading meme tokens is now a chaotic, dangerous casino.
The Solution: Attention Markets are replacing the casino with structured, trackable financial platforms.
How it Works: Platforms like @TrendleFi use verified social media data to let you directly predict the rise and fall of cultural trends without having to buy useless coins.
The Big Picture: It transforms a messy internet phenomenon into a fair, readable system, making the entire attention flow easier to understand for both the everyday users trading on it and the developers building on it.
Price Chases Attention
In crypto, we've all seen this play out very well. We’ve seen how random narratives catch fire...
It could be some half-baked idea, a viral meme, or a celebrity tweet… and suddenly millions of dollars start to pour into the trend.
No fundamentals, no roadmaps. I mean who needs those when vibes alone can pump a market cap from zero to billions in days.
Take the DOGE era back in 2021. What started as a joke about a Shiba Inu dog turned into a $90 billion beast, fueled purely by Elon's tweets and the crowd's insatiable FOMO.
No utility, no tech, just raw attention attracting heavy liquidity.
Fast-forward to SHIB in late 2021, another dog coin, another hype wave, peaking at over $40 billion on nothing but community support and narrative rotation.
Then we had PEPE in 2023, a frog meme that 100x'd overnight, minting millionaires from degens who timed the virality spike just right.
These weren't anomalies; they were proof. And here is what I have found out to be true in crypto and all narrative cycles in general:
attention is the scarcest primitive.
Memecoins nailed this accidentally. They turn attention into a permissionless experiment. Drop a token, let the crowd signal their focus with buys, and watch how the reflexive loop spins up.
The pump draws eyes, eyes create buzz, buzz drives more pumps. It was chaotic but it works.
But here's the thing, memecoins were raw and indirect. You weren't trading attention itself; you were gambling on a token tied to a topic/trend and hoping the hype held.
Manipulation was rampant, whale dumps, bot farms, rugs. No structured way to short decay or leverage longevity.
It worked as a proof-of-concept, showing pure narratives alone could drive real value.
But what if we could trade the trajectory of attention directly?
That's exactly where we're at in 2026. Memecoins set the stage for AttentionFi,
We are now entering a new era. The market is maturing from "buying a token and hoping people buy it" to structured, derivative markets that allow us to trade the trajectory and longevity of narratives directly.
Attention itself is becoming a tradable asset class.
The Other Experiments That Paved the Way
Like I explained, memecoins proved the thesis that it is possible to build or attract value to the attention surrounding a certain narrative or topic but they weren't the only shot at monetizing social attention.
Between 2023 and 2025, we saw a wave of intermediates, projects trying to formalize the chaos.
Most crashed hard, but their failures taught us what actually works.
Remember Friend(.)tech? It promised to financialize social networks by tokenizing "keys" to individuals. For a brief moment, it seemed like the future.
But the model was flawed. It relied on aggressive bonding curves that turned friendships into Ponzi schemes.
The moment the speculative mania cooled, the "utility" (access to a chat room) couldn't support the valuations.
It was a casino where the house rake was too high and the exit liquidity was your own friends/circle.
Then came the InfoFi / yap-to-earn in 2024-2025. These are basically just post-to-earn schemes where platforms reward engagement: likes, retweets, comments.
The thesis seemed sound, reward users for curating valuable information.
The reality was an absolute catastrophe. Yap-to-earn models incentivized industrial-scale spam.
We learned the hard way that if engagement is paid for, you just get noise.
While both socialfi and infofi differ from what attentionfi really is, I believe they are iterations or should I say, building blocks that helped us understand how to attention works and how to price them properly.
Attention Markets
AttentionFi is basically the infra that treats narrative as a first-class, tradable asset. It moves beyond binary prediction markets and into continuous, perpetual-style markets that track trends itself.
The core innovation here is creating a system that enables Perpetual-style markets on metrics like:
Viral Growth Rates: Betting on how fast a topic is spreading across major social channels.
Trend Lifespans: Betting against a narrative (shorting) when you detect that people are starting to lose interest, even if the topic is still dominating the headlines.
Audience Reach: Trading on whether a trend is breaking out into the mainstream or staying confined to a small internet niche.
Imagine an attention market that tracks the social sentiments around “Jeffery Epstein” or “Epstein Files” where you can long/short the narrative itself.
You can do two things;
Long: You believe the narrative is just heating up, that more mindshare is incoming,
Short: You believe the narrative is exhausted, the timeline is bored, and the attention half-life is kicking in.
Compare this to @Polymarket which excels at discrete events (elections, sports, politics), they resolve clean but limited to binaries.
And what about memecoin trading? They are Indirect, you own the token, hoping attention sticks and that nobody dumps on you and you'd have to navigate through tens/hundreds of pvps built around the same trend
Attention markets deviates completely from this, you can make direct bets on cultural topics, without holding any underlying token.
Not tokens.
Not binary events.
To Simply put it; long/short trends
But why does this matter to the average person? Why is this more than just giving traders a new way to gamble?
Because structured Attention Markets are the missing puzzle piece for the internet's cultural economy.
Let me break this down;
Democratizing Trend Spotting
Right now, figuring out what the internet cares about requires hours of manually scrolling through feeds, reading chaotic group chats, and trying to guess what will go viral next. Attention Finance crowdsources this work.
When hundreds of people place financial bets on a trend's trajectory, the resulting market price acts as a clear, highly accurate signal.
It takes the messy, unspoken intuition of the crowd and turns it into readable data. If a popular tech trend is suddenly seeing more people betting on its downfall, that is highly valuable information for builders and creators.
Building Blocks for the Digital Economy
This is where the concept gets truly revolutionary. Once you turn internet attention into a reliable, trackable financial metric, it can be plugged into other applications.
Just like the composability we experience with Prediction markets, new financial layers and product categories are being built on top polymarket and Kalshi
The measurement of human focus becomes a fundamental building block for a new kind of digital economy.
Decentralizing Big Tech's Business Model
For over two decades, massive tech companies have monopolized the value of our attention. They track what we look at, run it through secretive algorithms, and sell that data to advertisers.
AttentionFi flips this model. It makes the measurement of attention entirely public and transparent.
More importantly, it allows everyday participants to directly profit from their ability to understand and forecast culture, rather than just acting as passive consumers being fed content by a corporate algorithm.
Even Polymarket is building its own attention markets
Polymarket recently announced a major partnership with @KaitoAI to officially launch their town Attention Markets.
They are planning to release the first batch of these markets in early March, with the goal of expanding to thousands of different topics by the end of the year
Trendle
In my opinion, @TrendleFi (live on @monad ) serves as the clearest, most accessible proof that this concept works for everyday users.
Trendle has successfully built a whole system dedicated entirely to tracking the flow of attention and making it a tradable asset
How does Trendle measure/track attention?
To make this work, Trendle needs a way to measure attention fairly and accurately. It does this by creating a constantly updating score, referred to as the "Attention Index"
Every single minute, Trendle's system scans major social media platforms, specifically X, Reddit, and YouTube. It looks at hard, trackable numbers:
How many times is a topic being shared or retweeted?
How fast are people commenting on it?
How many views is a video getting?
What do the upvote scores look like?
The system powered by @azuroprotocol, takes all this messy social media activity, filters out the extreme noise, and crunches it into one single, clean number.
This score goes up when the internet is obsessed with a topic, and it goes down when people lose interest.
How You Actually Trade: Up or Down
On Trendle, you don't actually buy a digital coin or a meme token. You are simply making a continuous prediction.
Going Long (Betting Up): If you see a trend starting and you believe everyone will be talking about it tomorrow, you open a Long position. As the attention score climbs, you make a profit.
Going Short (Betting Down): If you see a trend that is currently huge but you know people will get bored of it by next week, you open a Short position. As the attention score drops, you make a profit.
The platform also allows for leverage (now up to 10x times your initial amount). This simply means the platform lets you multiply the size of your bet.
You can win more if your prediction is right, but you will also lose your money much faster if you are wrong. It is just like the way it works with regular perps.
Trendle is currently operating on closed beta meaning access to the platform is currently invite only but you can join the community on discord and TG for an invite code.
Final Thoughts
Memecoins are not dying.
Both memecoins and attention markets are trying to financialize the exact same underlying asset: cultural attention,
Memecoins will remain the chaotic, top-of-funnel entry point for internet culture. They will always be the preferred venue for pure retail gambling.
Attention markets on the other hand will become the domain of the analytical trader.
They will attract the capital that wants to execute cultural arbitrage with precision, without being left holding a bag of useless tokens when the music stops.
But as financial instruments, memecoins are becoming a prehistoric tech.
They are inherently flawed, plagued by insider allocations, sniper bots and the constant threat of a dev pulling the rug.
This is why we are seeing platforms like @zora recently rebranded as "attention markets" on Solana.
Because retail traders are looking for a cleaner, more verifiable way to trade the timeline.
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That said, I feel the biggest hurdle facing Attention markets isn't the technology anymore, it is the steep learning curve.
Because attention is a completely new asset class, you cannot use a normal financial chart or knowledge to predict how fast an internet joke or news is going to lose its humor
Traders now have to learn the nuances of entirely new signals.
You have to understand how to read sentiments, track narratives across different social platforms, and recognize the moments a trend hits peak saturation before the public stop talking about it
For example, the world cup is on its way and it is normal for an attention market trader on Trendle to expect the attention index around topics like: "Messi" or "Ronaldo" to be on the rise,
this is just a fundamental rule of how global trends works. something new users might not even understand yet as simple as it may sound.
This exactly why I am dedicating more time to fully grasp how attention markets work and how to profit from it
I encourage you to do the same
Here are some relevant folks you should follow closely;
@thenarrator, @PinnacleCrypt, @crexsol, @vicsclarissa, @0xSireal, @netrovertHQ, @mikhryc0x, @marvellousdefi, @Krptonoob
