From mindshare to slop: Why we're pausing Yaprun

Optimizing for attention

Crypto is a game of attention. Teams can build the greatest product in the world, but if they’re not capturing attention, it doesn’t matter. So when Kaito emerged as a platform that quantified attention and mindshare, we saw an opportunity to shift how we think about user acquisition and community growth. Our thesis was simple: high-quality mindshare drives high-quality users. The flywheel would create general conversation and buzz around Infinex, even without referral codes. And so Yaprun was born as a scheme campaign dedicated to "Mindshare Attribution," rewarding those who consistently generated meaningful awareness for Infinex.

Working with Kaito's leaderboards and our own internal data, we developed a proprietary algorithm that made the existing leaderboard more targeted and consistent with behavior we wanted to reward. With approximately $6 million USD planned for distribution across four seasons, this retroactive rewards system was designed to prevent gaming while demonstrating that authentic, well-researched and high-quality content about Infinex is valued. We believed this would establish a new meta for community engagement. There was a new scoreboard in town!

Bots, “Hold my beer.”

When mindshare farming became slop farming

Despite both Infinex and Kaito’s anti-gaming measures, Yaprun succumbed to the very problem it was designed to solve: noise drowned out signal. What began as artisanal mindshare farming evolved into industrial slop farming, the timeline was overwhelmed by low-quality content. Bots destroyed the network effects of legitimate content creators.

The fundamental issue we now face is that following legitimate accounts for Infinex information gets washed out by a tidal wave of manufactured engagement. When Kaito's smart followers metric ballooned to over 100,000 accounts - many of questionable authenticity - we realized the system had broken down. We are far more interested in 3-5,000 verified, real people whose contributions make a difference to the Infinex narrative.

The campaign created a feedback loop where the promise of substantial rewards attracted so much low-effort participation that the timeline became unusable even for our own team, including Kain. So we're pausing Yaprun after Season 1 to implement significant improvements and bot-nerfing measures. Season 2 will return when we've solved the fundamental challenge of maintaining quality at scale, ensuring that optimising for attention doesn't devolve back into the noise-farming we set out to leave behind.

Listen to Kain break down the problem in this video.

What’s next

It's time for a Yaprun reset. While we're pausing the campaign to address the slop problem, we're committed to honoring Season 1 participants who genuinely contributed to amplifying the Infinex story. You can find the results here. Season 1 has approximately 150M µPatrons in the reward pool, and if you've been genuinely yapping or referring quality users, rest assured you'll receive your share. Behind the scenes, we're cooking up a new campaign format with significantly improved scoring designed to better distinguish signal from slop.

Our goal remains unchanged: reward people genuinely building the Infinex narrative while eliminating bot sludge and low-effort content that drowns out authentic voices. The lessons learned from Yaprun's evolution - both its successes and its challenges - will inform a better system that preserves the community-building magic while filtering out the industrial-scale gaming that ultimately undermined the timeline. Stay tuned for more details on how we're rethinking mindshare optimization for the better.