Search Meets Crypto: Kaito's AI Knowledge Engine

In a digital economy that moves at the speed of light, information is the ultimate asset. Yet for the cryptocurrency world, this asset has long been a double-edged sword: vital for survival, but scattered, chaotic, and overwhelmingly noisy. Stepping in to solve this fundamental challenge is Yu Hu, a trading veteran who left the structured world of Citadel to build what many are now calling the essential intelligence layer for Web3: Kaito AI.

During an in-depth fireside chat at SCB 10X's REDeFiNE TOMORROW 2025, Yu Hu, CEO & Co-Founder of Kaito AI, laid out the company's origin, intricate technology, and audacious future vision in a conversation with Peeravid Srisukson, Investment Manager of SCB 10X. The discussion revealed a company forged in the crucible of crypto’s infamous market cycles, obsessed with solving a core problem, and poised to redefine how we interact with information through a novel concept called “InfoFi.” This is the story of how Kaito is building the “Bloomberg for crypto,” and why it matters now more than ever.

A Trader's Frustration and a Founder's Mission

The journey began not in a garage in Silicon Valley, but on the trading floors of traditional finance (TradFi). Yu Hu, Kaito’s CEO and Co-Founder, spent nearly a decade in finance, including a significant tenure as a trader at the hedge fund giant Citadel. When he began applying his skills to crypto, he was immediately struck by a stark reality: the tools and strategies that worked in TradFi were useless in Web3. While Wall Street had its Bloomberg terminals centralizing data, crypto’s information was a tangled mess, fragmented across Twitter, Discord, Telegram, governance forums, and podcasts. The research was, in his words, “overwhelming.” This personal pain point became Kaito’s founding mission: to build a specialized search engine that could navigate this chaos and distill actionable signals from the noise.

Building the “Bloomberg for Crypto” and Solving Information Fragmentation

At its core, Kaito is a vertical search engine designed to succeed where Google fails. While Google scrapes the open web, it cannot penetrate the semi-public walls of Discord servers or Telegram channels, nor does it possess the domain knowledge to identify reputable voices or crucial conversations within the crypto sphere. Kaito’s power comes from its ability to index these critical, hard-to-reach sources.

The scale of this operation is immense. Kaito actively indexes thousands of Discord servers, countless Twitter accounts, governance forums, and podcasts in real-time. But the challenge is constantly evolving. The platform is now expanding to index visually-driven platforms like TikTok and Instagram, which introduces entirely new complexities, including sophisticated video content analysis and the difficult task of developing cross-platform reputation scoring.

This ambition is underpinned by formidable technical architecture. Yu described the core challenge as building a real-time database capable of processing massive, unstructured data volumes while simultaneously applying deep domain knowledge to filter signals from noise. A crucial insight is that reputation is not universal; a trusted voice on Crypto Twitter holds a different kind of influence than a popular creator on TikTok. Kaito's engine is being built to understand these nuances, applying unique reputation assessment methods for each platform to provide a truly contextualized view of the market.

Beyond Search and Towards Proactive Intelligence

Simply aggregating data is not enough. Kaito’s true differentiator lies in its AI. Yu envisions AI agents revolutionizing user interfaces, moving beyond reactive search queries to become proactive analytical partners. He shared a powerful anecdote: at Citadel, he spent 20% of his time just trying to understand why a particular asset’s price moved. Kaito is now developing AI agents that can automate this exact task, analyzing market data, on-chain analytics, and social sentiment to instantly explain price movements for any token.

Of course, with great AI power comes great responsibility. Kaito employs a multi-layer approach to combat the risk of LLM “hallucination”—the tendency for AI to generate false information. This includes providing its models with real-time context from its own search engine, indexing structured datasets for factual queries (like price data), and implementing rigorous cross-checking mechanisms. While no system is perfect, this method drastically reduces the risk of providing the catastrophic misinformation that can plague financial applications.

Security and Resilience in a Volatile Market

Kaito's journey has been a masterclass in resilience. The company was founded in early 2022, just weeks before the historic collapse of Luna, which was quickly followed by the failures of Three Arrows Capital and FTX. Yet, these market-shattering events didn't derail them. Because their mission is to solve the evergreen problem of information fragmentation, Kaito’s value proposition remains constant regardless of market conditions. This focus on fundamentals over hype is a core tenet of their philosophy. While competitors chased the short-lived trend of entertainment-focused AI agents in late 2023, Kaito focused on building its “Yaps” platform, a decision that has paid off handsomely. Yaps has sustained its growth long after the hype cycle died down, now boasting 1 million registered users and driving significant business volume.

This resilience is matched by an obsessive focus on security, born from firsthand experience. In March, both Yu’s personal and Kaito’s corporate accounts were compromised in a sophisticated attack where malicious tweets were posted without any unauthorized login activity. The investigation revealed a coordinated effort linked to wallets that also targeted prominent accounts like Hyperliquid and Tier10k, with the attackers profiting by shorting the associated tokens just before the compromised tweets caused market panic.

In response, Kaito has implemented comprehensive security measures across the board. The company works closely with white-hat hackers, conducts regular system-wide audits—including full, in-depth Discord audits—and enforces mandatory 2FA for all team members on all social platforms. Security vulnerabilities are treated with the highest possible priority, a necessity in an industry where the stakes are astronomically high.

The Future is InfoFi: A New Economic Primitive

While Kaito Pro and Yaps solve today’s problems, Yu’s eyes are set on a much grander future, built around the nascent concept of InfoFi, or Information Finance. Citing prediction markets like Polymarket as pioneers.

Yu defines InfoFi as the financialization of information itself. The theory is that when people can trade on the outcome of an event or the direction of a trend, the resulting market price becomes the “closest source of truth.” Kaito aims to build new primitives on this concept, envisioning a future where people can trade on anything from emerging market trends to the popularity of a celebrity or the sentiment surrounding a political candidate.

The Kaito token is the cornerstone of this vision. Yu points out that in most online ecosystems, value accrues to a tiny minority of content creators (just 2-3% of Kaito’s user base). Kaito's tokenization strategy is designed to benefit the other 97-98%—the content consumers who make up the silent majority. Token holders can participate directly in the ecosystem's governance and value flow by, for example, pledging their tokens to various reward pools. This creates a powerful market mechanism that allows the community, rather than a centralized team, to direct incentives and decide what is most valuable.

This is not just a distant dream. Yu announced that Kaito will be launching new InfoFi mechanisms in Q3 of this year, taking concrete steps to build out this new attention economy where information, engagement, and content can be seamlessly monetized and traded.

A Two-Pronged Strategy for a Segmented Market

Underpinning this vision is a robust and pragmatic two-pronged business model that ensures the company's sustainable growth.

• Kaito Pro: The premium, B2B platform serves over 700 professional teams, including VCs and funds. It acts as an essential tool for tracking mindshare, analyzing competitors, and monitoring market narratives, serving as the company's primary revenue engine.
• Kaito Yaps: This free, retail-focused platform is designed for mass adoption. Yaps serves as the gateway to the token economy and is Kaito's core strategy for user distribution.

This clear market segmentation allows Kaito to meet the deep, analytical needs of professionals while simultaneously building a massive user base in the retail market.

In conclusion, the fireside chat with Yu Hu painted a picture of a company that is not merely participating in the crypto industry but is actively building its foundational infrastructure. By tackling the universal problem of information chaos with sophisticated AI, a resilient philosophy, and a revolutionary vision for InfoFi, Kaito is positioning itself as an indispensable tool for anyone looking to navigate the complex and exhilarating world of Web3.