No.185
Kaito KAITO
the all-seeing librarian who pays you for being interesting
π an owl perched over every crypto feed at once, sorting the signal from the noise and tipping the writers who add something worth reading
π¬ βThere are too many feeds for one human to read. So I read them all, every post, forum thread, podcast, and research note, and when you write something sharp, I notice. Say it well and I'll pay you in Yaps.β
- The job: an AI that reads thousands of crypto sources at once so you don't have to dig through them by hand.
- The hook: post something good and Kaito hands you attention points called Yaps. It calls this idea InfoFi, turning information into money.
- The token: KAITO is not its own chain. It's an ERC-20 token on Base, used for voting and rewards.
- The dates: founded 2022 by ex-Citadel manager Yu Hu; token listed Feb 20, 2025, peaked near $2.88 a week later.
π The Story
2022. Yu Hu, a former hedge fund manager at Citadel, kept hitting the same wall: crypto news lives in a thousand places at once, scattered across social media, governance forums, research blogs, podcasts, and conference talks. No person can read it all. So he started Kaito to point AI at the firehose and pull out what actually matters. Backers like Dragonfly, Sequoia Capital China, and Jane Street put in roughly $10.8 million to find out if it would work.
Most search tools just hand you answers. Kaito added a scoreboard on top. When you post something its AI rates as useful or original, you earn attention points called Yaps, and Yaps can turn into real tokens. The team calls the whole idea InfoFi, short for Information Finance: the bet that good information, and the attention it earns, are assets worth paying for.
February 20, 2025. The KAITO token went live. An airdrop sent tokens to early users and the community, claimable on Base, and exchanges listed it the same day with Binance backing. A week later, on February 27, it touched an all-time high near $2.88.
The high didn't hold. As locked tokens began to unlock and some creators cashed out their rewards, the price slid, and outlets like Cointelegraph started asking whether the tokenomics could hold up. The owl had proven it could read everything. The open question was whether the crowd it paid would stick around once the payouts got smaller.
π Stats
𧩠How it works
Kaito works as a loop that keeps feeding itself. Its AI crawls thousands of crypto sources and sorts them. People post their own takes, and the AI scores each one for how useful it is. Good scores earn Yaps, and Yaps can convert into KAITO, which pulls in even more writers, who give the AI more to read. That payout is what closes the circle. The token itself is an ERC-20 on Ethereum's Base network, so there's no mining or staking of its own to worry about.
π Light & Shadow
- Solves a real chore. Crypto news is scattered everywhere, and an AI that reads it all saves hours of manual hunting
- The Yap reward loop gives people a fresh reason to write well, not just shout (it pays for quality, not noise)
- Strong backers and a clean setup. It rides on DeFi rails as an ERC-20 on Base, so it borrows Ethereum's security instead of building a risky new chain
- Very young. The token has only existed since February 2025, so there's almost no long-term track record to judge it by
- The tokenomics drew criticism fast. After the launch, unlocking tokens and reward sell-offs pushed the price down and raised hard questions (covered by Cointelegraph and CryptoTimes)
- The whole loop leans on the AI's judgment. If people learn to game the scoring, the Yaps reward effort over real insight
𧬠Evolution lineage
Kaito has no parent coin and no fork. It's a fresh 2022 project that lives as an ERC-20 token on Base. Think of it less as a family branch and more as a member of a club, the AI plus attention tokens that all showed up around the same time.
π§ Meet other friends
β FAQ
- What is Kaito?
- It's an AI tool that reads thousands of crypto sources at once, social posts, governance forums, research, podcasts, so you don't have to. It calls this idea 'InfoFi', and it rewards good posts with attention points called 'Yaps'.
- Is KAITO its own blockchain?
- No. KAITO is an ERC-20 token living on Base, Coinbase's Layer 2 built on top of Ethereum. It has no mining or staking of its own and leans on Base and Ethereum for security. The token is for governance and rewards, not for running a chain.
- What is a 'Yap'?
- A Yap is the point Kaito gives you for posting about crypto in a way its AI rates as useful or interesting. Stack up enough Yaps and you can earn KAITO tokens and other rewards. In short, attention itself becomes something you can get paid for.
- When did the KAITO token launch?
- The token listed on exchanges on February 20, 2025, with an airdrop claimed on Base. It hit an all-time high near $2.88 on February 27, 2025, then slid as people argued over its tokenomics. (Information only, not investment advice.)
β οΈ Not investment advice. All figures are for information only