Are you seeing the terms ‘loud’, ‘loudio’, or ‘$loud’ pop up in your X feed lately? Is your favorite mercenary content creator talking about a ‘Loud leaderboard’?

Well get ready to mute those terms, or let the chaos of the Loud experiment commence!

A small team introduced Loud, a tokenized attention experiment. We already have memecoins which are essentially tokenized attention, but this one is arguably a purer form of this.

Earlier this week, 0x_ultra shared an overview of Loud and what it was all about:

• Kaito has built a platform that measures attention and allows it to be monetized. This ‘InfoFi’ movement has spawned additional platforms, tools, and marketplaces to incentivize content creation to drive attention to specific topics, ecosystems, and products in return for tokens and other rewards.

• Believe has created more effective incentive alignment between builders and speculators

• Loud combines these two concepts to become self-sustaining

  • Yappers talk about Loud

  • Speculators trade LOUD token

  • Trading fees are collected and distributed to the top 25 weekly Loud yappers

  • The flywheel repeats and sustains indefinitely

• The token has no inherent utility and becomes a proxy for attention

• Yapper mindshare and ranking for LOUD is determined by Kaito’s algorithms, and rewards are proportionally distributed

To showcase Loud mechanics in action, the team released LOUD launch details earlier today with the (first?) Initial Attention Offering, or IAO which will happen on Saturday, May 31st (in 2 days):

• 45% of the LOUD token supply will be sold in 2 phases

  • Phase 1, Priority Access: Top 1,000 LOUD yappers. The leaderboard is tracked here

  • Phase 2, Community Access: Kaito users with a linked Solana address and 10+ smart followers (a set of Crypto Twitter accounts with the highest inter-following ratios within the CT social graph, signifying a high-quality user). This phase will be FCFS (first come first served) with ~120k wallets that currently qualify. This number will increase leading up to the IAO.

This is the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard TPan.

And if that’s what you’re thinking, I agree…to a degree 😉

Skeptical folks like Xeer are prudently calling out the short-term attractiveness of the experiment, and the reality that some participants aren’t thinking about the medium to longterm implications around the tradeoffs some creators will be making by constantly posting about Loud.

Reputational risk is the primary reason why professional accounts like founders and VC’s aren’t participating.

Cobie subtweeted Loud and the general theme of the ‘pigeonification’ of crypto Twitter, calling out the increasingly eroding quality of content in the space with very valid points.

So if that’s the case, WTF is the point of Loud? Why is everyone talking about it? And when I mean everyone, I mean 57.80% of mindshare in the pre-TGE (projects that haven’t launched a token yet, not all topics in crypto/web3) category is about Loud.

Loud’s posts are getting botted, with the IAO article getting thousands of replies, reposts, likes, and 1.7M views.

Loud isn’t just loud. It’s a lot of loud noise.

But what if there was so much noise that signal could actually come from it? That’s what I’m curious about, and I think there are some early signs of that.

Regardless of how silly or interesting we think the Loud experiment is, it’s worth following at least at a high level.

Breadguy simplifies the main points of Loud with the Prisoner’s Dilemma concept of (3,3), where both parties cooperate for the optimal outcome for both sides. For Loud, the two parties are the yappers and the speculators.

In the ideal scenario and likely in the short term: Yappers yap ➡️ Speculators buy ➡️ Price go up ➡️ everyone happy ➡️ positive reinforcing loop.

At some point with most things in this space, the music eventually stops. Less speculators come in and there are more sellers ➡️ Price stagnates or goes down ➡️ Yappers yap less ➡️ everyone abandons ship ➡️ negative reinforcing loop.

Both sides have to cooperate to keep the Loud machine humming yapping.

And what would the best case scenario look like? Ultra lays it out for us. Sounds crazy, but there’s a non-zero chance and crazier things have happened.

As a simple comp, Believe’s most traded token is Gooncoin, with $279M in trading volume in the past ~2 weeks (total platform volume is $3.4B 😵). Believe applies a 2% fee on trades, which are split 50/50 between the platform and the creator.

This means Gooncoin has earned a total of $5.58M in fees total (token price is volatile so it’s less but still several million).

LOUD will have a 4% trading fee with 72% of the fee going to the mindshare pool. So to reach a $1M prize pool, there would need to be ~$35M in trading volume. Considering how much attention Loud already has pre-launch, a million dollar mindshare prize pool (in SOL) doesn’t sound as crazy as it sounds.

Countless celebrities have dabbled in crypto, NFTs, and memecoins. What’s a few posts about Loud over the course of a week for a quick 6 figure or more payday? And with no legal risk that comes with launching a memecoin or NFT collection? Cha-ching! 🤑

If Loud gets noisy enough, a community will organically form and with it an ecosystem.

• Builders will create additional tools and dashboards to track LOUD and the Loud ecosystem

• NFT collections will be minted

• Memecoin derivatives will launch

• Loud and LOUD will get integrated into other products and platforms

The last point seems to be happening already. Fantasy Top, the popular SocialFi game already shared early sneak peeks of a Loud integration, which will help creators provide revshare to their followers if they get into the Top 25 for the mindshare rewards pool.

We’re already seeing content creators pivot their strategy to position themselves ahead of the IAO and mindshare leaderboards, some more unapologetically than others:

• Follow for follow

• Farming engagement for a Smart Follower follow back since you need at least 10 Smart Followers to qualify for a shot at the Phase 2 sale of the IAO

• Posting memes about Loud

• Signing off posts about other topics with Loudio, a tactic which I’ve detailed in a previous post

• Sharing earnings with audience if they follow the creator’s accounts on other platforms

Although Loud has incorporated more cogs into the flywheel to make things more interesting, it isn’t a completely new idea.

In late 2023, Portalcoin ran a campaign incentivizing users to engage with the brand account and post about the project. Posts that received engagement earned points, which were converted to crystals and eventually the PORTAL token. The feed was littered with posts on PORTAL, similar to what some of us are seeing today with Loud.

The big difference here is that the rewards were in PORTAL token, while Loud’s mindshare pool is in SOL. Also, Loud is using Kaito to measure mindshare while Portal didn’t have the same tooling to filter the noise from the…noise.

Simpler non-financialized versions of Loud have existed as well. Remember the Instagram egg?

This 2019 post had a simple goal: To become the most liked post on Instagram. The post broke the previous record of 18.4M likes in 10 days and reached 45M likes by day 12. Currently, the post sits at 60.6M likes.

In many ways, Loud is like the egg but with a financial twist: What if you could put a value on the attention that something receives and reward those who drive the most attention towards it sustainably?

Again, it’s completely fair to think that Loud is a crock of shit. And my response to that is that’s sorta the point. The more important questions are can this crock of shit be useful? How big can this pile of shit get? What happens if it gets so big that the smell wafts beyond the petri dish Loud originated from? Can this last beyond a day or even a couple of weeks?

Besides the top 25 users who get a cut of the weekly mindshare pool, the clear winner here is Kaito and other InfoFi platforms. They’re presented with a live case study of what it looks like when a new entrant becomes a mindshare blackhole. What happens when the timeline is overwhelmingly flooded with talk about a single topic that came out of left field?

Loud was literally at 0 a week ago. Meanwhile, other tracked topics have been at it for months and years.

Even if LOUD flops out the gate, you can make an argument that Loud was already successful, albeit for a small number of players.

And it’s good to zoom out to the larger point that the Loud team is making and looking to answer:

This is an experiment on if attention is really all you need to make something valuable. If something has attention, does price follow and vice versa?

Influencers and creators across all formats accrue attention and charge sponsors for it /get payouts. Ads are inserted between shows and events, both IRL or on the screen. And if you don’t want ads? Well you gotta pay for that too.

Smart contracts and blockchain expand how attention is getting financialized, monetized, and conceptualized. Even if it started as nothing.

See you next week!

Loudio (lol)