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Token distribution
Kaito is a vertical AI search and information-finance platform built for markets where the useful information doesn't live in indexable web pages. Crypto is the founding example: the signal sits in Discord servers, governance forums, long X threads, podcast episodes, conference panels, research PDFs, and group chats. General-purpose large language models: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, historically struggled with this material because it is unstructured, ephemeral, and largely outside standard training corpora.
Kaito's answer was to build the index itself. The platform ingests thousands of Web3 and adjacent sources, structures them, and layers proprietary ranking plus semantic LLM retrieval on top. From that index, Kaito derived a second product line: measurement. If you can see everything being said, you can quantify who is being listened to. That metric is called mindshare, and it became Kaito's most commercially important invention.
Over four years the company expanded along a clear logical chain:
Index information → measure attention → distribute attention → allocate capital → price attention as a market.
Each product in the 2026 stack sits on one link of that chain.
This is a common search query and worth clarifying, because the terminology matters if you are reading tokenomics documents. KAITO's token distribution includes a Foundation allocation alongside allocations for Ecosystem & Network Growth, Core Contributors, Initial Community & Ecosystem Claim, Early Backers, Long-term Creator Incentives, Liquidity Incentives, and the Binance holder airdrop. Day-to-day product development, brand partnerships, and marketing campaigns, however, are run by Kaito AI, the operating company, led by Yu Hu. When commentators refer to "Kaito Foundation marketing activity," they are almost always describing campaigns run through Kaito's product surfaces: Studio, Katalyst, Capital Launchpad, and the mindshare leaderboards funded in part from ecosystem and creator-incentive allocations.
InfoFi, short for Information Finance, is the thesis that information and attention can be measured, tokenized, traded and rewarded like any other financial asset, using AI and market mechanisms instead of opaque platform algorithms.
The framing draws on a concept popularized by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin: use market forces to surface truth and allocate scarce resources. Kaito's white paper applies it to the attention economy, arguing that in the current arrangement value accrues disproportionately to centralized platforms while creators receive thin revenue shares and users are paid nothing at all for the engagement data they generate.
The economic logic sharpens as generative AI floods every channel with content. When information becomes effectively infinite, attention becomes the scarce asset, and scarce assets get priced. That single sentence explains almost every product Kaito has shipped since 2024.
InfoFi is now a recognized market category with its own index pages on major data aggregators, and Kaito remains its reference implementation. It is also the category that took the hardest hit in January 2026 when X moved against reward-for-posting applications, the defining event of Kaito's last 18 months, covered in detail in the news section below.
Kaito Pro is the commercial backbone: a crypto-native search engine and intelligence terminal. It indexes social media, governance forums, research, news, podcasts and conference transcripts, then combines proprietary search with semantic LLM retrieval and real-time analytics.
Core features include MetaSearch (cross-source semantic query), sentiment analytics, smart alerts, customizable dashboards, an audio library of transcribed podcasts and conference talks, and a catalyst calendar tracking token generation events, governance votes and protocol upgrades. Reported users include teams at Berachain, Polygon and Pantera, alongside 500+ other investment, marketing and research desks. Subscription pricing has been listed from roughly $833 per month, with individual and team tiers.
Kaito Pro matters strategically because it is the product least dependent on token incentives. It generates conventional software revenue, which is exactly what a token narrative under scrutiny needs underneath it.
Kaito Studio replaced Yaps as the primary creator surface. It launched in beta in February 2026 with 16 initial brand partners and moved to full launch in March 2026.
Studio is deliberately the opposite of Yaps in structure:
Brands (termed "Participating Brands") post campaigns with defined objectives, scopes of work, timelines, reward structures and content guidelines.
Creators apply for platform access eligibility is assessed by Kaito using signals such as follower count, reach, and impression volume, then browse campaigns and submit reward quotes.
Brands select creators at their sole discretion. Submitting a quote guarantees nothing.
Selected creators contract directly with the brand, not with Kaito.
Four differences from the old model define it: it is selective rather than permissionless; it is cross-platform, measuring content on X, YouTube and TikTok rather than X alone; it extends beyond crypto into finance, AI and other verticals; and rewards are tied to defined scopes of work rather than automated leaderboard scoring. Participants link a self-custodial wallet, and rewards are paid in digital assets.
Yu Hu's stated ambition for the year was blunt: 2026 would be when Kaito outgrows Crypto Twitter as its primary platform.
Katalyst is the newest and, for token holders, arguably the most consequential layer. It sits on top of creator campaigns and pays for outcomes rather than visibility. Attribution criteria include mindshare alongside clicks, sign-ups, deposits, and in-platform activity, a genuine performance-marketing model rather than a reach proxy.
Three design choices stand out:
A new TGE campaign format with no upfront cost for brands and stronger protections for creators.
A revived direct-distribution path to token holders. For TGE campaigns, 80% of each token pool goes to creators and 20% to KAITO stakers and YT-sKAITO holders, with time-based staking loyalty and Yapybara NFT ownership acting as multipliers.
A full attribution engine, powered by the new X data agreement, Kaito's own attribution technology, and zero-knowledge verification architecture developed with Brevis.
That 20% carve-out is the part worth underlining: it reconnects KAITO staking to actual campaign token distribution, creating a value-accrual route tied to creator-driven results. Kaito says it tested Katalyst for roughly two months with AI labs, consumer AI applications, and smart hardware companies and businesses across crypto and finance. Several projects are piloting; broader launches are expected. Adoption and realized distributions, at the time of writing, remain unproven.
Capital Launchpad is Kaito's merit-based token sale platform, introduced in July 2025 and live from August 2025 with Espresso's ESP token as the first Initial Community Offering. It exists to replace the first-come-first-served scramble that historically rewarded bots and whales.
Allocation is assessed across five dimensions: social reputation, on-chain holdings (not restricted to KAITO), historical alignment with the project or sector, regional distribution factors, and conviction level as demonstrated by long-term commitment.
The funding cycle runs in five stages: project setup, pledging, review, final allocation, then an FCFS stage for any unallocated remainder. Purchases settle in USDC on Base through an embedded wallet, KYC/AML is mandatory via Persona identity verification, and restricted jurisdictions are excluded.
The platform has demonstrated real demand: pledged allocations crossed $170 million by September 2025, and the Limitless (LMTS) sale drew roughly 200 million USDC in pledges, over 200x oversubscribed, with Kaito stakers and Yapybara NFT holders contributing 46.4 million USDC and Yaps-holding accounts a further 29.1 million USDC. Average allocation in that round was 31 USDC. Demand has not always translated into returns, which is covered honestly in the risk section.
Announced 10 February 2026 and rolling out from March, Attention Markets is a new prediction-market category where users take positions on:
Mindshare — how much an entity, brand, person, or trend is being discussed.
Sentiment — whether that discussion skews positive or negative.
Markets settle against Kaito's AI aggregation of data from X, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, with zero-knowledge verification from Brevis and EigenCloud used to attest to the AI outputs that determine payouts. Example markets: whether one AI lab's mindshare will exceed a rival's next month, or whether sentiment on a given public figure rises.
Two pilot markets launched in November 2025; the market on Polymarket's own mindshare by 31 March 2026 crossed $1.3 million in volume. Polymarket's crypto lead indicated dozens of markets from early March scaling toward thousands by year-end, expanding from AI topics into entertainment, finance, world events, sports, and geopolitics. Kaito also participated in the $7.1 million seed round for Noise, a separate perpetual-market venue where traders go long or short on Kaito mindshare and sentiment data, led by Paradigm in January 2026.
Kaito Markets is the forthcoming standalone, Kaito-branded attention-markets venue, intended to run alongside the Polymarket integration. It remains in development with no publicly disclosed launch date. Jurisdictional policy will be announced at launch.
Mindshare is Kaito's core measurement primitive, and understanding it explains why the whole ecosystem is structured the way it is.
Rather than counting followers or raw engagement, Kaito's models weight who is talking, what they are saying, and how relevant it is to a given topic. The Smart Followers metric identifies accounts whose attention correlates with informed market participants, so a mention from a respected researcher carries far more weight than a thousand replies from low-quality accounts. Mindshare is then expressed as a share of total attention within a defined category: a token, a sector, a region, or a foundation model, and surfaced through the Mindshare Arena dashboard.
That relative framing is what makes mindshare tradeable. A share-of-attention figure is bounded, comparable, and resolvable, which is precisely what a prediction market needs. It is also why Kaito's dashboards have expanded well past crypto: in July 2026 Kaito's foundation-model mindshare board reported Kimi taking the top position ahead of both GPT and Claude models, a first for the incumbents and a neat demonstration of the metric's reach into general AI coverage.
The obvious vulnerability is manipulation. If money settles against social metrics, artificial engagement becomes a financial attack vector. Kaito's countermeasures have included participation thresholds, anti-spam filters (a major overhaul shipped 8 August 2025), on-chain and social qualification filters, ZK-verified on-chain reputation via Brevis, and as of Katalyst attribution against real conversion events that are far harder to fake than impressions.
KAITO is an ERC-20 token on Base, capped at 1 billion units, launched 20 February 2025. Roughly 241.4 million tokens (~24.1%) are circulating, with cliff-based vesting extending into 2029. Allocations cover ecosystem & network growth, core contributors, initial community & ecosystem claim, Foundation, early backers, long-term creator incentives, liquidity incentives, and the Binance holder airdrop.
The token serves three stated functions: driving market forces (holders influence how attention is distributed across the network), acting as the network's primary currency, and enabling community governance over protocol and algorithm changes.
Staking KAITO mints sKAITO, a yield-bearing receipt whose value accrues automatically, with no manual claiming. Unstaking carries a 7-day cooldown. sKAITO confers voting weight that scales with both size and duration held, deliberately favoring long-term participants, and grants priority access across the Kaito ecosystem, including Capital Launchpad allocation scoring.
Governance weighting has been actively tuned. In April 2025 sKAITO and NFT holders' voting power rose from 50% to 75% while Yapper voting power fell to 25%; the voting system was then paused in May 2025 pending a redesign around assigning stake to projects for boosted mindshare accrual.
Through Pendle, sKAITO can be split into PT-sKAITO (principal token forgoes ecosystem airdrops in exchange for materially higher fixed yield, and counts toward Capital Launchpad ranking) and YT-sKAITO (yield token cheap leveraged exposure to ecosystem airdrops and rewards, expiring worthless at maturity). Katalyst's 20% TGE carve-out explicitly names YT-sKAITO holders alongside stakers, which restores direct economic relevance to that yield-token market.
Yapybara is Kaito's NFT collection, functioning as an on-chain identity and loyalty marker. Holders receive leaderboard contribution boosts through proof-of-ownership and proof-of-PFP integrations, priority allocation treatment on Capital Launchpad, and now multiplier status within Katalyst. Some holders have publicly argued the collection deserves utility beyond multipliers a live governance debate rather than a settled question.
gKAITO was previewed in July 2025 as a rewards mechanism organized around five pillars: thought leadership, attention, participation, ownership, and culture. Following the Yaps shutdown, its full launch details remain pending, and its design is expected to be reshaped around Studio, Katalyst, Capital Launchpad, and Attention Markets rather than Yap-based scoring.
Kaito's structural advantage is vertical integration. It owns the index, the measurement layer, the distribution surface, the capital allocation rail, and now the attribution engine. Its structural vulnerability is equally clear: everything above depends on data access from platforms it does not control, which is exactly what January 2026 proved.
Platform dependency: January 2026 demonstrated that a single API policy change at X can eliminate a flagship product overnight. The July 2026 data agreement mitigates this materially but does not remove it; commercial terms, duration, and exclusivity have not been disclosed.
Unlock the dilution schedule: With roughly 24% of supply circulating and vesting running to 2029, supply expansion is a recurring headwind. The 20 July 2026 tranche alone added an estimated 7–8% to circulating supply.
Launchpad performance history: Several Capital Launchpad cohort projects have performed poorly post-TGE. Play AI fell approximately 95.8% from a $50 million post-TGE valuation, and Hana Network declined around 89% from its 2025 peak. Merit-based allocation improves fairness of access; it does not underwrite valuation discipline.
Attention without fundamentals: Messari's analysis of post-TGE Kaito campaigns found that leaderboards raised average and median monthly mindshare for 88% of projects analyzed, with gains ranging from single digits to over 8,000%, yet fundamentals such as TVL and daily active addresses rarely improved absent separate incentive programs, and net price action was largely flat or negative. The market appears to discount manufactured attention.
Data integrity and manipulation: When payouts settle against social metrics, artificial engagement becomes a paid attack surface. ZK verification and conversion-based attribution reduce the surface; they do not eliminate it.
Regulatory exposure: Attention Markets sits within prediction-market regulation, which varies sharply by jurisdiction. Polymarket's own restrictions apply, and Capital Launchpad excludes several jurisdictions outright.
Token utility in transition: KAITO's value narrative is being actively rewritten. Katalyst's staker carve-out is the clearest link yet between token ownership and cash-flow-like distribution, but it needs sustained campaign volume to matter.
With Yaps retired, there is no permissionless post-to-earn route. The current paths are
Apply to Kaito Studio as a creator at kaito.ai/studio, sign up, connect a self-custodial wallet, await eligibility review, then browse campaigns and submit reward quotes. Kaito is not obliged to explain rejections.
Watch for Katalyst campaigns. Because Katalyst pays on attributed outcomes, creators with genuinely converting audiences are advantaged over those with large but passive reach.
Use Kaito Pro for research-paid subscriptions or publicly available MetaSearch features.
Participate in Capital Launchpad, complete KYC, fund USDC on Base, pledge to campaigns matching your thesis, and understand that staking size, Yapybara holdings and Yaps history all influence allocation.
Trade Attention Markets on Polymarket or kaito.ai, subject to your jurisdiction's rules.
Stake KAITO for sKAITO: governance weight, launchpad ranking, and the Katalyst TGE carve-out, noting the 7-day unstake cooldown.
The defining event of Kaito's year happened in its second week.
On 14 January 2026, Kaito received a legal notice from X. Yu Hu, who confirmed it publicly and said the company responded promptly. The trigger had been signaled days earlier when X's product lead, Nikita Bier, announced that X was revising its developer API policies and would no longer permit applications explicitly naming InfoFi that reward users for posting on the platform. The stated rationale was the surge in AI-generated content and reply spam degrading the timeline.
On 15 January 2026, Hu announced that Kaito would sunset Yaps and its incentivized Yapper Leaderboards entirely.
His explanation was notably candid. Kaito had spent the previous year iterating hard on Yaps: stricter eligibility rules, higher leaderboard thresholds, social and on-chain qualification filters, and alternative incentive designs. Despite all of it, low-quality content and spam persisted, compounded by X algorithm changes and by competing InfoFi projects launching with weaker thresholds or none at all, which pulled the whole category's quality floor downward. After discussions with X, both sides concluded that a fully permissionless distribution model was no longer viable.
The KAITO token fell roughly 17–20% on the news.
Critically, the damage was contained to one product line. Kaito Pro, the Kaito API, Capital Launchpad, and the in-development Kaito Markets were unaffected. But the strategic implication was larger than any single product: Kaito's most visible, most community-defining, most narrative-generating feature had been switched off by a third party's policy decision.
Hu's response was to reframe rather than retreat. He placed the shift inside a broader thesis about crypto's own evolution, arguing that as the ownership-economy narrative fades, crypto's real opportunity is becoming infrastructure for actual finance: payments, stablecoins, tokenization, and global markets. Applied to Kaito, that meant moving beyond Crypto Twitter and beyond crypto as the core vertical. His stated goal for the year, 2026, would be when Kaito surpasses CT as its primary platform.
Kaito Studio entered beta in February 2026 with 16 brand partners, then officially launched in March 2026.
The design inverted nearly every assumption of the Yaps era. Where Yaps was open to anyone with an X account and scored output algorithmically, Studio vets creators for eligibility, let's brands hand-pick collaborators, define scopes of work in advance, and measure across X, YouTube, and TikTok. Selected creators contract directly with brands rather than with Kaito.
The 16 launch partners mattered as a signal: Kaito was not starting the new model from zero. Commentators framed it as a shift from "post and maybe get rewarded" to structured engagements with measurable outcomes closer to a professionalized creator agency than a points game. For the InfoFi category, it was the clearest statement yet that the permissionless era had ended and a curated one had begun.
Announced 10 February 2026 and rolling out from early March, the Polymarket partnership was Kaito's boldest product move of the year: turning mindshare itself into a tradeable instrument.
The context explains the ambition. Prediction market volumes had grown roughly 850% year-over-year, reaching about $6.2 billion in weekly volume by January 2026. Polymarket alone posted $7.66 billion in January volume, up 44% month-over-month, against Kalshi's $9.55 billion. Polymarket had re-entered the US market in February 2026 and was reported to be exploring an IPO.
Into that market, Kaito supplied a new asset class. Attention Markets lets traders take positions on how much a brand, person, trend, or topic is discussed and whether the tone is positive or negative, settled against Kaito's cross-platform AI aggregation. Two pilot markets had launched in November 2025; the one on Polymarket's own mindshare by 31 March 2026 crossed $1.3 million in volume, while a Crypto Twitter mindshare market did around $90,000. Polymarket's crypto lead confirmed plans for dozens of markets in March scaling to thousands by year-end, beginning with AI topics before expanding into entertainment, finance, world events, sports, and geopolitics.
Kaito also backed the adjacent bet: it participated in Noise's $7.1 million January 2026 seed round led by Paradigm, alongside GSR and JPEG Trading. Noise is a perpetual market where traders go long or short directly on Kaito mindshare and sentiment data, making Kaito simultaneously a supplier to, and shareholder in, a venue trading its own metrics.
The critical response was engaged but skeptical, and the objection was consistent: if payouts settle on social metrics, artificial engagement becomes a financial attack vector. Kaito's answer was cryptographic, ZK verification from Brevis and EigenCloud attesting to the AI outputs that determine settlement, building on the Brevis integration first shipped in late 2025 that let campaign participants prove on-chain credentials without revealing wallet addresses.
Roughly 17.8 million KAITO (1.8% of total supply, valued near $17 million) unlocked on 20 July 2026, with about 6.94 million tagged for Core Contributors and the remainder split across early backers and ecosystem funds. Estimates put the effect at a 7–8% increase in circulating supply.
Mechanically, this is a dilution event that expands the set of possible sellers. In practice, KAITO absorbed it. Around 17 July the token gained roughly 14%, while major cryptocurrencies fell 3–5%, with analysts noting a golden-cross pattern and rotation into AI-narrative tokens. The unlock became a test; the token passed rather than a ceiling it hit, though vesting continues to 2029, so the test recurs.
On 23 July 2026, Kaito announced it had entered a data agreement with X. The post was deliberately spare a wide range of use cases, more coming soon and drew roughly 2.2 million views.
What it means is bigger than its word count. This is the direct reversal of January's damage: official, sanctioned, corporate-level access to X's real-time social data, replacing the third-party API dependency that X had revoked. For a company whose entire product stack rests on reading social conversation as it happens, this converts an existential platform risk into a contractual relationship.
The downstream implications run through everything Kaito builds. Kaito Pro's sentiment and mindshare analytics get a stable, high-throughput feed. Attention Markets get more defensible settlement data. Structured real-time sentiment feeds become viable for the autonomous AI agents increasingly used in crypto research and trading. And competitively, it repositions Kaito against LunarCrush and Santiment as the sanctioned gateway rather than one more scraper.
Appropriate caution is warranted on the specifics. No commercial terms, technical scope, duration, or exclusivity were disclosed. As several analysts noted, crypto headlines compress very different arrangements into the single word "partnership" a data license, an enterprise API contract, a product integration, and an equity investment are not interchangeable. What is confirmed is a formal data relationship with more detail promised. What is not established is exclusivity, unrestricted access to all X content, or any X investment in Kaito or the token.
Six days after the X deal, Kaito shipped the product it enabled.
Kaito Katalyst, announced 29 July 2026, is a reward layer for creator campaigns where projects pay for what creators actually drive. Kaito described it as the closest thing yet to the model its community had been requesting, rebuilt with a better underlying mechanism and, pointedly, in line with platform rules.
Hu's summary of what changed:
A new TGE campaign format with better alignment, no upfront cost for brands, and stronger protections for creators.
Direct drops returning to sKAITO and YT holders, with time-based staking loyalty and Yapybara ownership as multipliers.
A full attribution engine.
Opportunities beyond crypto.
The attribution criteria are the substance: rewards can reflect mindshare plus clicks, sign-ups, deposits, and in-platform activity. That is materially harder to farm than impressions, because it requires real users doing real things. The technical stack is the X data agreement, the Brevis verification architecture, and Kaito's proprietary attribution technology.
For token holders, the 80/20 split is the headline: on TGE campaigns, 80% of each token pool goes to creators and 20% to KAITO stakers and YT-sKAITO holders. This is the most direct link Kaito has ever drawn between holding the token and receiving campaign distributions, a value-accrual route tied to creator-driven results rather than visibility. It also revives economic relevance for the Pendle YT-sKAITO market and gives Yapybara NFTs a concrete new function.
Kaito says it spent roughly two months testing. Katalyst with AI labs, consumer AI applications, and smart hardware companies and businesses across crypto and finance. Several projects are already piloting; more launches are expected. The token gained around 10% from $1.10 shortly after the announcement.
The honest caveat: the announcement establishes availability and pilot usage. It does not yet demonstrate broad adoption or realized distributions across campaigns. Not every community reaction was uncritical either; some Yapybara holders argued that multiplier status is thin utility for an NFT that cost holders four to five figures.
Kaito's most interesting marketing activity is that its products are the marketing. There is no conventional campaign spend to analyze; there is a machine that manufactures attention as a byproduct of operating.
Leaderboards as distributed advertising. For two years, Kaito's leaderboards turned thousands of creators into a voluntary sales force for partner projects. Messari's analysis quantified the effect: post-TGE Kaito leaderboard campaigns increased average and median monthly mindshare for 88% of projects analyzed, with gains ranging from single digits to over 8,000%, and found a strong positive correlation between mindshare and account-level engagement a genuine force multiplier for core messaging.
The same analysis contained the uncomfortable finding. Projects rarely saw meaningful improvement in fundamentals such as TVL or daily active addresses unless they were simultaneously running separate fundamentals-focused programs, and net price action was largely flat or negative. The market discounts manufactured attention when it isn't backed by improving fundamentals. Katalyst's entire design pays for deposits and sign-ups, not impressions, reads as a direct response to that critique.
Launchpad scarcity as demand engineering. Capital Launchpad generates its own attention cycle. Pledged allocations crossed $170 million by September 2025; the Limitless sale drew roughly 200 million USDC in pledges and was over 200x oversubscribed, with Kaito stakers and Yapybara holders contributing 46.4 million USDC and Yaps accounts 29.1 million USDC. In September 2025, launchpad activity coincided with a 1,230% spike in KAITO trading volume and a run to $1.52.
The counter-evidence is equally public. Several cohort projects collapsed post-TGE, Play AI down roughly 95.8% from a $50 million post-TGE valuation, and Hana Network down around 89% from its 2025 peak. Merit-based allocation fixed who gets in. It did not fix what they were buying.
Ecosystem partnerships as credibility infrastructure. The Brevis ZK integration, the The EigenCloud verification layer, the Polymarket distribution deal, the Noise investment, the Pendle yield markets, and now the X data agreement collectively function as a trust portfolio. Each addresses a specific objection: privacy, verifiability, liquidity, data legitimacy and each generates its own news cycle.
Mindshare dashboards as owned media. Kaito publishes competitive attention rankings that other people want to talk about. When its foundation-model board showed Kimi overtaking GPT and Claude in July 2026, that became a story in the AI world, not just crypto, precisely the cross-vertical expansion Hu promised in January.
As of late July 2026, KAITO trades in the $1.10–$1.20 range with a market cap near $265 million, having gained roughly 120% over the month and about 14% in the 24 hours to 26 July on around $39 million of spot volume. Daily RSI reached 77 deep overbought territory on 24 July at $1.05, while the broader Fear & Greed Index sat at 28, indicating the move ran counter to general market sentiment. Futures liquidity is concentrated: OKX led KAITO futures activity at roughly $187 million, followed by Binance at about $142 million and Bybit near $48 million.
The token remains well below its $2.92 all-time high from February 2025, and Kaito Pro documentation was refreshed on 25 July 2026, indicating active platform work alongside the announcements.
The "more coming soon" from the X deal: Scope, duration, and product integrations are the difference between a routine enterprise API contract and a genuine strategic moat.
Katalyst adoption metrics: Campaign count, brand names, and most importantly, the first realized 20% distributions to stakers and YT-sKAITO holders.
Kaito Markets launch: A standalone, Kaito-branded attention-markets venue captures far more value than supplying data to Polymarket.
Non-crypto vertical proof: Hu promised expansion beyond crypto. Named AI, consumer-hardware, and finance brands running Studio or Katalyst campaigns would validate it.
The gKAITO redesign: Its post-Yaps form will reveal how Kaito intends token utility to work long-term.
The next unlock tranches: Vesting runs to 2029; each cliff re-tests demand.
Attention-market scaling: Polymarket targeted thousands of markets by year-end. Actual volume growth will show whether attention is a real asset class or a novelty.
Kaito is an AI-powered InfoFi platform that indexes crypto and adjacent information, measures attention as "mindshare," and monetizes it through a creator marketplace, a merit-based launchpad, and attention prediction markets.
KAITO is the ERC-20 network token on Base. It drives how attention is distributed across the network, functions as the ecosystem's primary currency, and grants governance rights. Staked as sKAITO, it also confers launchpad allocation weight and, since Katalyst, a 20% share of TGE campaign token pools alongside YT-sKAITO holders.
Yu Hu, a former Citadel hedge fund manager, founded Kaito in 2022. He remains CEO and is the primary public voice for the project on X.
Base. KAITO is an ERC-20 token on Coinbase's Ethereum Layer 2.
1 billion tokens, capped. Approximately 241.4 million (~24.1%) were circulating as of late July 2026, with cliff-based vesting running into 2029.
No. Yaps and the incentivized Yapper Leaderboards were shut down on 15 January 2026 after X revoked API access for applications rewarding users for posting. Kaito Studio and Kaito Katalyst replaced them.
No. Yap Points ended on 15 January 2026. There is no direct permissionless replacement. Creators now apply to Kaito Studio for selected brand campaigns or participate in Katalyst campaigns where rewards are attributed to measurable outcomes.
A selective, tier-based brand–creator marketplace launched in beta in February 2026 with 16 brand partners and fully launched in March 2026. Brands post campaigns with defined scopes; vetted creators submit reward quotes; brands choose. It spans X, YouTube, and TikTok across crypto, finance, and AI verticals.
Launched 29 July 2026, Katalyst is a reward layer for creator campaigns where projects pay for attributed results like clicks, sign-ups, deposits, and in-platform activity rather than reach alone. It introduces a no-upfront-cost TGE campaign format, a full attribution engine, and an 80/20 split where 80% of each TGE token pool goes to creators and 20% to KAITO stakers and YT-S-KAITO holders.
Yaps was permissionless and scored social output; Katalyst is campaign-scoped and scores verified downstream results. Yaps paid for talking; Katalyst pays for converting. Katalyst also runs on a sanctioned X data agreement rather than open third-party API access.
Prediction markets, built with Polymarket and live from March 2026, where users take positions on the mindshare and sentiment of brands, trends, topics, and public figures. They settle against Kaito's AI aggregation of X, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube data, with ZK verification from Brevis and EigenCloud.
Mindshare is Kaito's measure of what share of total attention within a category an entity captures. It weights the credibility and relevance of speakers via the Smart Followers metric rather than counting raw followers or engagement.
Kaito's merit-based token sale platform. Instead of first-come-first-served, allocation is assessed on social reputation, on-chain holdings, historical alignment, regional factors, and demonstrated conviction. It settles in USDC on Base, requires KYC, and excludes restricted jurisdictions.
The yield-bearing receipt token is received when staking KAITO. Rewards accrue automatically into the token's value; unstaking has a 7-day cooldown. sKAITO carries governance weight scaled by size and duration, plus launchpad priority.
Pendle-based splits of sKAITO. PT-sKAITO trades away ecosystem airdrop rights for substantially higher fixed yield and retains launchpad ranking value. YT-sKAITO is cheap leveraged exposure to ecosystem airdrops and rewards and expires worthless at maturity. Katalyst explicitly includes YT-sKAITO holders in its 20% TGE carve-out.
Kaito's NFT collection, functioning as an on-chain identity and loyalty marker. It provides leaderboard contribution boosts, Capital Launchpad priority treatment, and multiplier status in Katalyst campaigns.
A rewards mechanism previewed in July 2025 built on five pillars, thought leadership, attention, participation, ownership, and culture. Its full launch details remain pending, and its design is expected to be reshaped around the post-Yaps product stack.
Kaito is a venture-backed company founded in 2022, with roughly $10.5–10.8 million raised from Dragonfly Capital, Sequoia Capital China, Jane Street, and HashKey Capital, among others. Its Kaito Pro terminal is used by 500+ professional crypto teams. That establishes it as a real operating business; it does not make the token a good investment, which is a separate question requiring your own research.
Three overlapping catalysts: broad rotation into AI and crypto-data narratives, the 23 July X data agreement announcement, and the 29 July Katalyst launch. The rally was already underway before the X news, making the announcements accelerants rather than sole causes.
Not visibly in the short term. Roughly 17.8 million tokens (1.8% of supply, $17 million, with about 6.94 million to Core Contributors) unlocked on 20 July 2026, expanding circulating supply by an estimated 7–8%. KAITO nonetheless gained 14% around 17 July while major assets fell and continued climbing through month-end.
Kaito Pro and the API are conventional software available broadly. Capital Launchpad requires KYC/AML and excludes certain jurisdictions to check current eligibility. Attention Markets on Polymarket are subject to Polymarket's own jurisdictional restrictions. Kaito Markets' policy will be stated at launch.
LunarCrush and Santiment in social and on-chain analytics; Cookie DAO in InfoFi creator incentives; Noise in tradeable attention. Kaito's differentiator is owning the full stack from index through measurement, distribution, capital allocation, and attribution.
Information Finance: the framework treating information and attention as measurable, tokenizable, and tradeable assets, allocated by market mechanisms and AI rather than opaque platform algorithms. Kaito is the category's reference implementation.
Dependence on third-party platform data access, ongoing token unlocks through 2029, weak post-TGE performance among several launchpad cohort projects, evidence that manufactured attention does not translate into fundamentals, manipulation risk when money settles on social metrics, and prediction-market regulatory uncertainty.
