Crypto has always run on narratives, yet 2025 has minted a new attention machine: KaitoAI Earn leaderboards.
Projects pre-pay “yappers”—researchers, meme smiths, threadooors—in future tokens for manufacturing hype.
Reward early mindshare
Spin a story
Engineer demand before TGE
It works. Leaderboards juice visibility, volume and social proof.
The open question: does the attention stick?
Once the airdrop is claimed, yappers pivot to the next shiny ticker, prices sag, volume evaporates and engagement flat-lines.
Below, a critical look at four Kaito alumni—$SKATE, $HUMA, $QUAI, $SOON—to see whether the post-launch story matches the pre-launch hype.
SKATE: High Beta on Day One, Radio Silence by Week Three
Token for a Solana modular gaming layer.
TGE: 10 Jun 2025
– Open: $0.06506
– Close: $0.05094 (-22 % intraday)
– Volume: $41.46 M
– FDV: ~$65 M
7 Jul 2025: $0.04065 (-37 % from TGE), 24 h volume $8.46 M (≈ 140 % of mkt cap)
Social chatter peaked the first week, then plunged as Kaito contributors rotated to fresher quests.
Take-away: deep liquidity, zero stickiness.
HUMA: Launchpool Frenzy, 0.5 % Kaito Pool, $300 M Day-One Churn
A PayFi protocol that married Binance Launchpool with Kaito Earn.
23–26 May 2025: mine HUMA by staking BNB/FDUSD/USDC
Kaito allocated 0.5 % supply across three “seasons”
<100 subscribers
TGE: 26 May
– Open: $0.06683 → Close: $0.05936 (-11 %)
– Day-1 volume: $310 M on a $103 M float
7 Jul: $0.03083 (-54 %), volume off >90 %, FDV 5.8× circulating cap.
Early claim-and-flip mechanics outweighed any product-led demand.
QUAI: Generous Airdrop, Meme Lords Paid, Chart Never Recovered
Multi-threaded L1 blockchain; 6 M $QUAI (≈ $1.1 M at peak) earmarked for Kaito.
Tradable: 22 Feb 2025
– Open: $0.09884 → High: $0.2263 → Close: $0.1929 (+95 %)
– Volume: $10.14 M
7 Jul: $0.05266 (-73 % from close, ‑77 % from high)
Top yappers walked away with up to 5.95 % of the allocation; the rest of the market walked away entirely.
SOON: SVM Rollup, Binance Alpha Debut, 66 % Drawdown in Six Weeks
High-performance Solana optimistic rollup.
19 Feb–19 May Kaito campaign: 450 k SOON (0.045 % supply) to top-100 yappers
TGE on Binance Alpha: 23 May
– Open: $0.4527 → Close: $0.4007 (-12 %)
– Volume: $103 M
7 Jul: $0.1529 (-66 %); volume/MC ≈ 97 %
Claim window closed 23 Jun; price promptly fell off a cliff.
The Pattern Is the Product
Across genres (gaming, infra, PayFi) and venues (Binance, Bitget) the script never changes:
Pre-TGE narrative blast
Launch-day volume spike
Airdrop rotation
Narrative decay within weeks
Kaito itself is not at fault; as a content-discovery layer it excels. The flaw is token design that rewards noise, not conviction.
Until projects bake in retention mechanics, real utility and incentive alignment for holding, Kaito will remain a powerful ignition switch—but rarely a soft landing pad.
