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- Attention Finance (AttentionFi) is 'Tipping' ...The Next Wave of The Degenerate Economy
Attention Finance (AttentionFi) is 'Tipping' ...The Next Wave of The Degenerate Economy
Memecoins were the thing before the thing...
Howard Lindzon
February 22, 2026
Happy Sunday from beautiful Coronado.
I am heading for a ride right after I get this post done.
I really enjoyed this essay by Baheet on The Attention Economy and Attention Finance. Do read it.
The essay brings a lot of jumbled ideas in my head together as prediction markets proliferate.
One of the features I like most about prediction markets is the ability to separate events and direction when it comes to stocks and markets. I have never been comfortable both trying to get an event right ie - Company X will beat sales, or beat revenue and also picking the direction of the stock.
With prediction markets I am able to bet on an event or a direction. I am confident there will be an explosion in users and trades (and therefore TAM) from the breaking out of events and direction. I think ‘copy betting’ will be a massive growth feature of this unlock. Robinhood unlocked massive TAM with ‘free trades’ and mobile brokerage the last 12 years - along with Coinbase, Alpaca, Nubank, Revolut etc - but Polymarket and Kalshi (the prediction markets) feel like the beginnings of an even bigger unlock.
Per Baheet’s essay, ‘attentionfi’ is interesting because …
What if we could trade the trajectory of attention directly?
That's exactly where we're at in 2026. Memecoins set the stage for AttentionFi,
We are now entering a new era. The market is maturing from "buying a token and hoping people buy it" to structured, derivative markets that allow us to trade the trajectory and longevity of narratives directly.
Attention itself is becoming a tradable asset class.
The best selling year 2000 book The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell, was a book that changed how I think about investing - despite it not being a book about investing.
I read the book and wondered why Malcolm never attached his ideas of ‘tipping points’ to stocks or markets. It was the non investor version of Peter Lynch’s best selling investing book ‘One Up On Wall Street’.
Today, because of the Degenerate Economy and prediction markets, every investor should read both books.
After reading Malcom’s book I made sure on every trip to New York I make sure I spend time walking SOHO to make sure I see what shoppers are thinking and what trends may still be early. I still do that today. Democratizing trend spotting will make the time I spend in SOHO, traveling and walking the streets even more valuable…
Democratizing Trend Spotting
Right now, figuring out what the internet cares about requires hours of manually scrolling through feeds, reading chaotic group chats, and trying to guess what will go viral next. Attention Finance crowdsources this work.
When hundreds of people place financial bets on a trend's trajectory, the resulting market price acts as a clear, highly accurate signal.
It takes the messy, unspoken intuition of the crowd and turns it into readable data. If a popular tech trend is suddenly seeing more people betting on its downfall, that is highly valuable information for builders and creators.
In 2003, I would have loved to been able to bet on the explosion of Apple’s white ear buds…but the only way to do it was to buy the stock. I did buy the stock, but it was hard for me to truly understand how the ear buds would affect the stock price. In this new world I will be able to bet on both the trend of the product and the stock separately.
Today, I believe I have an edge in certain prediction and attention markets because of my curation and understanding of Stocktwits. With prediction and attention markets - millions of Stocktwits users will be able to better tap the ‘wisdom of our crowds’ on the platform to make their own attention and prediction investments and bets.
Baheet continues…
Building Blocks for the Digital Economy
This is where the concept gets truly revolutionary. Once you turn internet attention into a reliable, trackable financial metric, it can be plugged into other applications.
Just like the composability we experience with Prediction markets, new financial layers and product categories are being built on top polymarket and Kalshi
The measurement of human focus becomes a fundamental building block for a new kind of digital economy.
Decentralizing Big Tech's Business Model
For over two decades, massive tech companies have monopolized the value of our attention. They track what we look at, run it through secretive algorithms, and sell that data to advertisers.
AttentionFi flips this model. It makes the measurement of attention entirely public and transparent.
More importantly, it allows everyday participants to directly profit from their ability to understand and forecast culture, rather than just acting as passive consumers being fed content by a corporate algorithm.
I covered the memecoin craze here on the newsletter knowing it would end badly. In January 2025 as Trump and Melania launched their memecoin grifts, it was obvious the end was near.
It turns out thought that memecoin mania was the ‘thing before the thing’. We have seen this countless times before. QVC was the thing just before the internet and Amazon. The sports gambling online casino’s are likely the thing before the thing - prediction markets and memecoins were the thing before the thing - attention markets.
Baheet’s final thoughts are excellent and timely
Final Thoughts
Memecoins are not dying.
Both memecoins and attention markets are trying to financialize the exact same underlying asset: cultural attention,
Memecoins will remain the chaotic, top-of-funnel entry point for internet culture. They will always be the preferred venue for pure retail gambling.
Attention markets on the other hand will become the domain of the analytical trader.
They will attract the capital that wants to execute cultural arbitrage with precision, without being left holding a bag of useless tokens when the music stops.
But as financial instruments, memecoins are becoming a prehistoric tech.
They are inherently flawed, plagued by insider allocations, sniper bots and the constant threat of a dev pulling the rug.
This is why we are seeing platforms like @zora recently rebranded as "attention markets" on Solana.
Because retail traders are looking for a cleaner, more verifiable way to trade the timeline.
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That said, I feel the biggest hurdle facing Attention markets isn't the technology anymore, it is the steep learning curve.
Because attention is a completely new asset class, you cannot use a normal financial chart or knowledge to predict how fast an internet joke or news is going to lose its humor
Traders now have to learn the nuances of entirely new signals.
You have to understand how to read sentiments, track narratives across different social platforms, and recognize the moments a trend hits peak saturation before the public stop talking about it
For example, the world cup is on its way and it is normal for an attention market trader on Trendle to expect the attention index around topics like: "Messi" or "Ronaldo" to be on the rise,
this is just a fundamental rule of how global trends works. something new users might not even understand yet as simple as it may sound.
This exactly why I am dedicating more time to fully grasp how attention markets work and how to profit from it
I encourage you to do the same
This trend is just shaping up and will not be a smooth line as regulators and competition shape them.
This is a great time to be an investor/trader and for beginners to be learning the language of the markets.
Have a great Sunday.
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