"The 'AirDrop Hustle' is trending. What is the new Web3 concept InfoFi?"

Original Author: sleepy.mid

Recently, Twitter has been flooded with posts, and I've seen many friends claim a significant airdrop through "mouth marketing" of Huma. In today's article, I will attempt to dissect the so-called InfoFi to see what has shaped it and what it has changed. With Kaito's rise to fame and today, we can already see a paradigm shift happening within the Web3 world.

In this shift, "mouth marketing" airdrops have transitioned from a fringe behavior to a mainstream participation channel; "information output" has shifted from content creation to a key element of industry identity construction; and "narrative capability" is taking over the dominant position of "usage behavior" in the airdrop system. All of this points to the same trend: the restructuring of attention structures, the financialization of information behavior, and the transformation of consensus into a manufacturable resource.

1. The Death of Interactive Airdrops, Beginning with Its Fantasy

The logic behind the old generation of airdrops was like this: "We'll create a product, design interactions, and airdrop coins to early users. This way, we can cultivate their usage habits and achieve user retention." This logic established a seemingly reasonable positive expectation between 2018 and 2022, but today it has collapsed:

· Many interactive addresses are scripted behaviors without real user intent;
· Project launch equals airdrop, airdrop equals dump, and users leave after short-term arbitrage;
· So-called "incentive retention" has become a mere talk, with the vast majority of projects experiencing a data cliff post-airdrop.

You expect to tame today's users with future expectations, but users simply don't believe in this future. More importantly, interactive behavior is no longer scarce and no longer reflects genuine user intent. The conclusion is clear: airdrops were never a cure-all for activating a product; they were merely a traffic explosion device to make the market aware of you but not to make users stay.

Therefore, the airdrop logic began to shift from "Behavioral Finance" to "Information Finance": it's not about what you did but about what you said, who saw it, and how much social diffusion it brought. This is a shift in the value cognition model and a re-understanding of the core driving force of the crypto world: in a Web3 world where consensus precedes product and narrative precedes usage, information is the primary asset.

2. The Triple Logic Pedestal of InfoFi

If we see InfoFi as a mechanism design, its logic pedestal comes from three dimensions:

1) Value Creation's Restructuring

Traditional airdrops rely on interactive behavior to measure "early value." However, InfoFi believes that information behavior itself is the starting point of consensus generation. Every tweet, every meme, every expression of opinion is a write-in to consensus, contributing to the creation of future market memory.

2) Mechanism for Binding Personality and Identity

On-chain addresses are anonymous, but social behavior is not. InfoFi binds off-chain identity, expression, social reach capability to on-chain addresses, forming a weightage system of influence with personality traits.
This makes airdrop distribution more targeted, moving away from the old mindset of "interaction equals user."

3) Narrative Timing and Deep Coupling of Capital Release

The project's online node launch is highly coupled with the peak of social discourse, leveraging airdrops to trigger early hype, ignite an attention dividend window, and form a liquidity fulcrum. In this structure, "verbal effusion" is no longer a cheap behavior but deeply integrated into the logic of crypto consensus. Let's put it more bluntly: verbal effusion is the native mining mode of the information age.

· In PoS, capital is a form of staking;
· In InfoFi, influence is a form of "collateral."

In the logic of "verbal effusion," what you stake is your identity, your opinion, the social risk of speaking up for a project, which is fundamentally no different from the traditional way of participation, and even involves greater upfront costs (you need to understand the project, produce content, bear speech risks). It forms a complete value creation path. When on-chain behavior is mechanized and scripted, the mouth becomes the only input that still carries human warmth. This is why verbal effusers can benefit from the InfoFi mechanism, as they provide social trust that cannot be faked by a contract.

Of course, there is now a phenomenon of AI-generated content for airdrop effusion, copying content, disguising opinions, and mass-producing content farms. This is a problem that the InfoFi project needs to address through model optimization and identity recognition mechanisms.
However, just like in the Web2 SEO era, even "site groups" and "content farms" serve a certain distribution goal; they do not disrupt the system but further drive the system to evolve.

Three, InfoFi is a Positive Response of Web3 to Attention Finance

Let's compare social media to another infrastructure for direct user engagement. The wallet is the cold start layer, social is the hot start layer. The wallet represents "operating rights," and social represents "speech rights." In this information-first, asset-lagging structure, all early users are forced to become "content distribution nodes." You are not promoting a project; you are creating a "consensus air layer" for the project's token release. This air layer is not void; it is a form of informational friction that legitimizes capital flow.

InfoFi is indeed building a mechanism: whoever can create more social friction for me, I will give more chips to. In this structure, "mouth mining" is not about taking advantage but is a professional entry point into a social consensus mechanism. This is a sign of information as a financial asset participating in production relationships. The rapid development of mouth mining airdrops is the manifestation of the narrative itself becoming a product. The project is building a narrative, users are participating in the narrative, the platform is identifying the narrative, and the token is carrying the narrative. In this on-chain society, the narrative goes online before the product, and content flows faster than code. InfoFi is the encrypted world's orthodox response to the financialization of attention, with mouth mining being a natural form of participation rather than a gray area. If usage is proof of participation, then information expression is proof of trust. If liquidity is the lifeblood of the market, then social volume is the source of that lifeblood.

IV. Next Steps: Super-Individual Consensus Engineering, Information Becomes Organizational Asset

If you pay enough attention and go deep enough, you will find that it has vaguely revealed the embryonic form of an industrial logic. There is already a group of KOLs no longer working alone but participating in narratives in an organizational manner. The future airdrop narrative will no longer be the accidental emergence of a group but will be like shooting a movie, with a clear theme design, rhythm arrangement, and role division:

· The project's cold start phase is the warm-up;
· Pre-IDO is the climax preparation;
· Launch day creates a high-energy point;
· After the airdrop lands, the organization collectively reviews and outputs a successful narrative template.

We will see "content creators + topic organizers + social amplifiers + visual aesthetic planners" forming small-scale communication DAOs and engaging in collaborative information warfare. The most radical speculation is: information itself will take on some liquidity issuance functions. The past Liquidity Bootstrapping emphasized fund coordination; in the future, we may see Info Bootstrapping, determining the initial token distribution ratio, price benchmark, and even circulation window through the depth and breadth of narrative dissemination. First create a narrative; the coin is just a prop for the climax. Information is no longer a medium to assets; it is part of the asset minting process itself.

We are entering an era where narratives are structured and manufactured. In this era: whoever can organize more people's expressions has a stronger consensus generation ability; whoever can create a replicable narrative rhythm can truly forge "information assets." The mouth is no longer just a mining machine; it is becoming an industrial belt.

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