Social Media Makes It Easier Than Ever to Manufacture Hype. So How Can Investors Spot “Real Attention” in Crypto?

When evaluating a company, investors typically start with the fundamentals: revenue, profit, customer growth, or other data points that help indicate where the business is heading. But in crypto, investors may need to make decisions before many of those numbers even exist.

A project might still be in its early stages, with a nascent product and little visibility into revenue, yet already have an active social media presence, a growing community, and a token that anyone can invest in.

This makes the distance between “seeing what people are paying attention to” and “putting capital behind it” remarkably short in crypto. We might discover a project on our feed today and buy its token minutes later. Attention, therefore, is no longer just online buzz. It can quickly translate into the movement of capital across the market.

“Not all attention is good, and not all attention is created equal.”

Tascha Punyaneramitdee, CEO & Founder of INFINIT, explored this idea in a conversation with Nicole Nguyen, Founder of APAC DAO. As attention becomes increasingly influential in crypto markets, the challenge is no longer simply identifying what is gaining traction. Investors also need to distinguish attention driven by genuine value from attention manufactured to create short-term hype.

A Project Getting More Attention Doesn’t Necessarily Mean It Has More Value

One reason attention matters so much in crypto is that many projects become accessible to investors at a much earlier stage than publicly listed companies.

While investors in traditional markets can often look at revenue, profit, and other business metrics, early-stage crypto projects may not yet have enough fundamental data to evaluate. Investors therefore have to look for alternative signals, and attention has become one of them.

But not all attention is the same. Tascha separates it into two categories: Organic Attention, which emerges naturally, and Manufactured Attention, which is deliberately created.

Rather than focusing solely on follower counts or how often a project is mentioned, Tascha looks at something more important: the relationship between value and attention.

If a project attracts enormous attention but delivers little value to its users, that attention may not last. On the other hand, if a product genuinely creates value for users, developers, or its community, those groups have a reason to talk about it—and attention can grow as a consequence of the value being created.

The question, then, is not simply “Which project is getting the most attention?” but “Why are people paying attention to this project in the first place?”

Want to Know if the Hype Is Real? Sometimes the Best Test Is Simply Using the Product

For investors who are new to the market, Tascha suggests starting with something simple: social media.

If a project has a huge follower count but unusually low engagement, or if its comment sections are filled with low-quality posts, AI-generated responses, or conversations that have little to do with the actual product, those could be reasons to question the attention surrounding it.

But social media does not tell the whole story. A more straightforward approach is to actually use the product.

If everyone on your feed is talking about a project, but its product is difficult to use, riddled with bugs, or unable to demonstrate a clear benefit, the gap between the hype and the actual product should raise questions.

At the same time, there is no single metric that works for every project. A developer-focused product should be evaluated partly through its mindshare among developers. A consumer product, meanwhile, should be assessed through actual usage and the value users receive. Communities, retail traders, and large investors also need to be considered.

Ultimately, genuine attention tends to emerge as a by-product of creating real value for the people a project is designed to serve.

The Easier It Becomes to Manufacture Hype, the More the Market Has to Return to Fundamentals

When attention can influence prices, there will naturally be incentives to manufacture it for financial gain.

As manufactured attention becomes more common, investors are beginning to return to fundamental questions: Does the project generate revenue? Are people actually using it? Can it become profitable? What is the token's utility? And how does the value created by the project accrue to token holders?

In other words, the market is returning to fundamentals.

That does not mean attention is becoming irrelevant. Instead, attention and fundamentals may need to be considered together.

Attention tells us where the market is looking. Fundamentals tell us whether there is something real underneath what everyone is looking at.

If AI Knows What People Are Paying Attention to First, the Advantage May Go to Those Who Can Move First

Until now, tracking attention might have meant scrolling through social media, reading community conversations, and piecing together what the market was beginning to care about. AI is making that process much faster.

Tascha believes organizations equipped with AI can identify emerging trends, analyze the relationship between attention and capital flows, and use those insights to allocate capital more efficiently.

At the same time, AI can make previously complex tools more accessible to everyday users.

INFINIT is applying AI to DeFi to help users allocate capital across different protocols and blockchains, reducing processes that could previously require dozens of manual steps.

For its future Agentic Trading product, INFINIT is also designing the system to separate AI decision-making from actual execution. AI generates analysis and trading recommendations, while execution remains governed by predefined risk-management rules and safety measures.

AI, therefore, is not only helping us identify opportunities faster. It is also shortening the distance between seeing an opportunity and acting on it.

As AI Makes Products Easier to Build, Getting People to Choose Yours May Become the Harder Problem

AI is not only changing the investor side of the equation. It is also making products easier to build.

As more people use AI to create products and services faster, the ability to simply “build” may become less of a competitive advantage.

Tascha believes distribution will become increasingly important. In a world overflowing with products, building something good may not be enough. Builders also need to get that product in front of the people who actually need it.

This is where AI brings the conversation back to attention.

For investors, the easier it becomes to manufacture hype, the more important it becomes to identify which attention is backed by genuine value.

For builders, the easier AI makes it to create products, the more important it becomes to ask how to create enough value for people to pay attention and choose what they have built.

In a world where both products and hype are becoming easier to create, genuine human attention may become increasingly valuable.

The advantage may not belong to whoever builds the fastest or makes the most noise, but to those who can create real value—and get that value in front of the right people first.

Watch the full conversation: Attention as an Asset Class: The New Primitive Behind Digital Assets Price Discovery

Source: Analyzed and adapted from the session “Attention as an Asset Class: The New Primitive Behind Digital Assets Price Discovery.”