Attention Capital VS Social Capital: The Dual Value Prototypes of the Encryption Economy

When people misunderstand the two, it often leads to a rug event.

Written by: Dino

Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News

Historically, financial capital has been the dominant perspective for measuring and exchanging value. Financial capital includes cash, equity, and other liquid or investable instruments, which flow through the banking system, investment funds, and public markets, where they are priced, traded, and optimized to achieve investment returns.

However, the value in today’s economic system is no longer limited to the financial aspect.

Attention capital stems from the scarcity of attention. In a world saturated with information, what people choose to pay attention to and think about becomes a valuable resource.

Social capital is built on trust, reputation, and influence, representing the value accumulated from interpersonal networks and relationships, reflected in others’ perceptions of your credibility, abilities, and alignment with values.

Thanks to artificial intelligence and blockchain, we are entering a new era. In this era, attention can be easily quantified, traded, and speculated, while social capital can also be staked, reduced, and mortgaged. These are no longer abstract concepts but programmable primitives. They are giving rise to two new types of markets.

Attention ≠ Social Capital

It is crucial to clarify the distinction between attention and social capital:

• Attention capital relates to what people see, click on, or react to at the moment, reflected through short-term engagement metrics such as exposure, views, likes, and shares, driven by viral spread and trends.
• Social capital reflects the objects that people truly trust, respect, or wish to associate with, requiring not only “winning” but also “being recognized.” It accumulates slowly and relies on sustained behavior and community validation.

The key is that attention is easier to manipulate. Robots, clickbait, emotional provocation, or meme hype can increase exposure without substantial content; whereas social capital is very difficult to counterfeit, as it requires time, reputation, and real investment.

What type of capital are you trading?

Some platforms operate completely based on attention capital, for example:

Pump.fun is built entirely around viral reflection, where the token’s appeal relies on short-term memes, influencer promotion, and cultural hotspots, belonging to a purely attention market with high liquidity, high speculation sensitivity, and reflexivity. The recent Loud! experiment is an extreme case.

Noise allows users to speculate on popular crypto projects, tokenizing “mind shares” (rather than beliefs). Noise is built on top of Kaito — Kaito popularized the concept of “mind shares” in the crypto industry, claiming that its scoring integrates X interactive data based on reputation weight, seemingly closer to social capital. However, many people are skeptical about this, pointing out that a large proportion of the mind share leaderboard may not necessarily reflect genuine high-quality community engagement.

Ethos is a true social capital market. Users can stake ETH to endorse others, binding trust with economic consequences. If someone behaves improperly, their endorsers will have their staked assets reduced. This gives trust financial significance and reputational costs. Ethos also introduces market mechanisms that allow users to go long or short on reputation.

Time.fun is in a hybrid zone: the value of assets mainly comes from social capital, and also includes a certain amount of attention capital. Users can purchase opportunities to interact with well-known crypto founders, builders, and investors, and its value proposition is not based on “who is a popular figure,” but rather on “whose time is worth acquiring,” thus it mainly belongs to the social capital market.

Fantasy.top and Pump Pals also belong to the hybrid domain: the value of assets mainly derives from attention capital, which includes a certain amount of social capital. These two platforms evaluate the social performance and engagement of influential cryptocurrency figures and adult entertainers (the former focuses on X, while the latter focuses on Instagram, OnlyFans, and PornHub). Although the nature of “performance” varies across different platforms, social performance and interaction can temporarily be equated with “attention.”

It is worth noting that both incorporate some reputation indicators into their scoring systems. If long-term reputation and consistency are more important than original indicators in determining value, they may turn to the social capital market. For example, Fantasy.top can incorporate Ethos reputation scores, while Pump Pals can analyze the interaction continuity of core fans over a specific period.

The Importance of Distinction

In the wave of cultural financialization, many platforms seem to facilitate trust-based outcomes, but in reality, they are only promoting attention-based outputs. This leads to misaligned incentives, distorted pricing, and systems that collapse under the pressure of hype.

When people misjudge attention capital as social capital, it often leads to “rug events.” A person may appear trustworthy, but in reality, they have just gained a lot of attention. The reputation market can help people discern these noises.

When people misjudge “performative trust” as “real trust,” it can also trigger rug events. A person may appear trustworthy because they use the right buzzwords, align with popular values, or indicate some kind of relationship, but in reality, this person may not be as trustworthy as they seem. Verifiable behavior and staking guarantee mechanisms can help reveal a person’s true credibility.

Of course, when people who have real trust decide to exchange social capital for financial or attention capital, rug events can occur. The reduction mechanism cannot completely solve the problem, but it can influence behavior through a “reward and punishment mechanism.”

Attention and social capital are fundamentally different, with distinct behavioral patterns. They often require different primitives, mechanisms, and safeguards. By recognizing this difference, builders can design more durable and ethical systems, preventing viral propagation from masquerading as trust.

Why is it important now?

The attention economy is rapidly showing signs of cracks: people are increasingly realizing that “merely relying on mind share is far from enough.” Too many hollow trends, too much fallout after the hype cycles.

But this sense of frustration is not the end of the story, but rather the beginning of a more complex narrative. When attention capital and social capital are seen as independent yet complementary forces, new types of markets will be unlocked. These markets can not only attract attention but also cultivate trust. Attention provides superficial signals, while social capital gives those signals a depth and foundation that is worth believing.

Imagine a platform that integrates Kaito scores, Ethos scores, and other forms of contextual reputation scoring. Imagine being able to see these contexts across all the applications you use daily, allowing you to gain a comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of finance, attention, and social capital. There are many experiments worth trying that can serve as checks and balances to help improve decision-making, filter out noise, and facilitate more responsible, human-centered collaborative systems.

If we can achieve this, we can not only create better social tools but also redefine the value of the digital age.