Navigating the Information Deluge: How InfoFi is Reshaping Web3 for Founders

In the rapidly expanding universe of Web3, we're often faced not with a scarcity of information, but an overwhelming abundance of it. The real challenge lies in sifting through the noise to discern what's truly relevant and valuable. This is where Information Finance, or InfoFi, steps in, an emerging sector within the Web3 ecosystem that ingeniously leverages financial mechanisms to extract, aggregate, and disseminate valuable information as a public good.

‍

First introduced by Vitalik Buterin in November 2024, InfoFi envisions systems where markets are deliberately designed to elicit specific information from participants, unlike traditional finance where information is merely a byproduct of price movements. For us at ChainGPT Labs, a dedicated venture capital and incubation arm of ChainGPT, InfoFi represents a pivotal shift that aligns perfectly with our mission to accelerate the growth and success of pioneering Web3 startups. We believe this new paradigm is set to empower founders with unprecedented clarity and strategic advantage.

‍

At ChainGPT Labs, we're always exploring the frontiers of Web3 innovation. We recently dove deep into the InfoFi narrative, examining how this transformative landscape is shaping the future of decentralized information.

‍

To explore the core concepts and key players in this sector in greater depth, continue reading as the evolution of InfoFi is unpacked in detail.

‍

What Exactly is InfoFi?

At its core, InfoFi is a discipline where financial mechanisms are deliberately designed to elicit, aggregate, and disseminate valuable information. Unlike traditional finance, where information is merely an incidental byproduct of price movements, InfoFi creates structured incentives for truth and insight. Consider prediction markets, for instance, which effectively aggregate dispersed information through price discovery by financially rewarding participants for revealing their true beliefs about future events. This foundational concept has rapidly evolved, transforming into a burgeoning sector that encompasses everything from advanced AI-powered search engines to modular data layers. InfoFi directly addresses the contemporary challenge of information overload by providing a means to discern relevance and value amidst an ever-growing sea of data.

Why InfoFi is Invaluable for Web3 Founders

For Web3 founders, the emergence of InfoFi is not merely a theoretical development; it's a critical, actionable shift. In a decentralized landscape frequently characterized by fragmented information and ephemeral hype, InfoFi platforms offer a powerful antidote, providing a strategic edge:

• Cutting Through the Noise: InfoFi provides curated, actionable insights, thereby significantly reducing the time and resources founders might otherwise waste navigating unreliable or irrelevant data sources. It’s about efficiently finding the signal in the noise.
• Identifying Genuine Trends: By financially incentivizing accurate information and validated insights, InfoFi helps founders discern authentic market movements and sentiment, enabling decisions to be made based on reliable data rather than speculation.
• Strategic Decision-Making: Access to transparent and validated information empowers founders to make more informed choices across critical areas, including product development, marketing strategies, and strategic partnerships, ultimately fostering more effective and sustainable growth.
• Gaining Legitimate Visibility and Attention: InfoFi mechanisms, by rewarding valuable contributions and verifiable insights, enable promising projects to cut through the pervasive clutter and gain the attention they legitimately deserve, fostering a fairer and more efficient environment for early-stage startups aiming for market penetration and robust community engagement.

Emerging Players Shaping the InfoFi Landscape

The InfoFi sector is experiencing rapid expansion, with several innovative projects at the forefront of redefining how we interact with and extract value from information in Web3. These platforms offer sophisticated solutions for founders looking to strategically leverage the power of structured and incentivized information.

Cookie DAO: The Modular Data Layer for AI Agents

Cookie DAO, a project incubated by ChainGPT Labs, is a significant InfoFi player that positions itself as a modular data layer for both humans and AI agents. Its flagship platform, cookie.fun, serves as the largest AI index in crypto , tracking live social and on-chain data for over 1,500 AI agents and infrastructure projects. This extensive data-driven approach, built on 7TB of live data feeds, empowers crypto traders to make informed investment decisions by distinguishing genuine trends from mere hype. Furthermore, cookie.fun v1.0, set to launch in Q2 2025, will expand its scope beyond AI, providing comprehensive on-chain, trading, and social intelligence for the entire crypto space. To delve deeper into their vision and technical architecture, we highly recommend exploring the Cookie DAO Docs.

The core of cookie.fun's value lies in its ability to parse the vast social layer of Web3. As the visual below illustrates, cookie.fun is a data platform specifically designed to showcase social data, including mindshare, sentiment, and top opinion leaders across all crypto sectors. It actively tracks and ranks X (formerly Twitter) users and conversations on Crypto Twitter (CT) by social engagement and sentiment.

A particularly innovative aspect is Cookie Snaps, a project-to-creator marketplace embedded within the cookie.fun ecosystem. Cookie DAO launched Snaps to utilize SNAPS points for scoring and rewarding content on CT. 

Within just one day of its launch, 25,835 creators had already joined the platform. This transparent mechanism enables crypto projects to run targeted rewards campaigns while equitably recognizing the vital role of content creators in shaping project visibility and narrative. 

Cookie DAO has continued to launch several Snap campaigns, with their most recent being with PlaySapien, attracting over 2500 snappers within just one day of the campaign going live. Cookie DAO’s commitment to democratizing analytics and returning the value of information to its users highlights its role in fostering a more equitable and efficient information landscape in Web3.

DexCheck: Comprehensive Market Intelligence

DexCheck, another project incubated by ChainGPT Labs, strongly exemplifies the broader InfoFi trend by offering advanced analytics designed for qualitative investment strategies. This platform seamlessly combines advanced analytics and innovative AI-driven features with an intuitive, user-friendly interface, making historically complex insights accessible to a wide audience across over 25 integrated blockchain networks. DexCheck aims to directly address the pressing shortcomings of current crypto analytics tools, such as limited data scope, excessive complexity, and a general lack of actionable insights.

A cornerstone of DexCheck's offerings is InsightsGPT, an AI-powered DEXs tracker that delivers valuable real-time insights to investors by analyzing millions of smart money wallets and DEX transactions. Employing sophisticated machine learning algorithms, InsightsGPT uncovers key patterns, emerging trends, and significant market shifts within vast blockchain data, offering intelligent alerts and signals for timely decision-making. Furthermore, their Crypto Whales Tracker empowers users to monitor the activities of influential and large-scale investors, providing crucial insights into their transactions, holdings, and strategies, which can help identify trends and opportunities often before they become apparent to the broader market. 

DexCheck also features REPS (Fair rewards for impactful conversations), a social reward system built for progressive community-building and incentivization programs. REPS actively turns valuable conversations into real rewards, promoting community loyalty and optimizing marketing campaigns by rewarding meaningful contributions to discussions. 

What InfoFi Means for Projects Building in Web3

The emergence of InfoFi presents clear and compelling opportunities for founders building in the Web3 space. It's no longer just about developing a superior product; it's also about strategically understanding how your project interacts with and contributes to the evolving decentralized information economy.

1. Adapting Your Product-Market Fit for the InfoFi Narrative: Founders should thoughtfully consider how their projects can inherently integrate InfoFi principles and capabilities. This involves exploring avenues such as:

• Incentivizing Data Contribution: Can your protocol or application be designed to reward users for providing accurate, verifiable, or uniquely valuable data, thereby contributing to a collective knowledge base?
• Building Trust and Credibility Infrastructure: How can your product contribute to or leverage decentralized trust and credibility scoring systems, fostering verifiable on-chain reputations?
• Structuring Unstructured Information: Can your solution help curate real-time social sentiment or effectively transform fragmented, often chaotic, data into cohesive, actionable insights?
• Leveraging AI for Enhanced Insights: Beyond basic functionality, can you integrate AI to extract deeper, more nuanced insights from both on-chain and off-chain data, providing a comprehensive view of market trends and project traction?

2. Leveraging InfoFi Platforms to Run Campaigns: Beyond merely adapting your core product, InfoFi platforms offer powerful new avenues for marketing, community growth, and achieving critical project visibility. Founders can strategically leverage these platforms to:

• Run Targeted Attention Campaigns: Projects can initiate tokenized attention programs, such as running Yaps campaigns on Kaito or Snaps campaigns on Cookie DAO. These initiatives effectively reward users for generating and sharing valuable insights and content about their project. The results from these types of campaigns have proven to be very promising, with projects consistently seeing exponential growth in users and mindshare across Crypto Twitter.
• Engage with Decentralized Creator Ecosystems: Utilize marketplaces designed to connect projects with content creators, enabling targeted rewards campaigns that recognize and incentivize creators based on their demonstrable impact. This approach democratizes analytics and empowers creators by aligning incentives for mutual growth and visibility.
• Drive Community Loyalty and Sophisticated Marketing: Leverage social reward systems that turn valuable conversations into tangible rewards. Such platforms are designed for robust community-building and incentivization, allowing projects to foster deeper community loyalty, optimize marketing campaign efficiency, and cultivate a dedicated base of supporters who actively evangelize the project.
• Gain Actionable Market Intelligence: Actively utilize advanced analytics and data aggregation capabilities offered by InfoFi platforms. This allows founders to proactively stay ahead of market trends, monitor real-time sentiment, and refine their strategies based on comprehensive, data-backed intelligence.

Future Outlook for InfoFi

InfoFi represents a new paradigm where financial incentives drive the production and validation of valuable, credible information, extending beyond crypto to transform how information is sourced and rewarded across industries.

However, founders must acknowledge key considerations. "Mindshare" doesn't automatically equal "market share"; attention must be underpinned by robust fundamentals like genuine utility, sound tokenomics, and healthy liquidity. While powerful incentive mechanisms, such as Yaps campaigns on Kaito or Snaps campaigns on Cookie DAO, significantly boost engagement, managing potential "engagement farming" is crucial to ensure truly valuable contributions prevail.

At ChainGPT Labs, we are actively shaping this future. As the venture capital and incubation arm of ChainGPT, an AI leader in Web3, our enthusiasm for InfoFi aligns perfectly with our mission to accelerate pioneering startups.

If you are building something cool, Apply to our incubation program

‍