Maximizing Your Crypto Opportunities with Kaito and YAPS: A Conversation with ICO Beast
In this second installment of our interview series, we dive deep into Kaito and YAPS with crypto expert ICO Beast. We explore how this AI-enabled social analytics platform works, the opportunities it presents for crypto enthusiasts, and strategies to maximize your returns with minimal risk.
Introduction to Kaito and YAPS
ICO Beast explains that Kaito is fundamentally "an AI-enabled social scraping platform" that analyzes Twitter (with plans to expand to other platforms) to determine how much influence and mindshare individuals have based on their engagement and other metrics processed through AI models.
"They grab information and data from Twitter... and they basically determine how much influence and how much mindshare a single person has based off the engagement and number of other factors they run through their AI models from your posting," ICO Beast explains.
The platform quantifies this influence through metrics like:
- Mindshare: What percentage of conversation around a protocol or crypto Twitter in general someone drives
- YAPS: A numerical representation of how someone accumulates mindshare over time
"I ended up eighth pre-TGE on Kaito. And I've sat in the top 10 of crypto Twitter mindshare now for probably close to five or six months, which is honestly mind-blowing," shares ICO Beast. "It's weird to open up Kaito and see your name next to people like Ansem and Vitalik... and then you've got my little silly lion picture."
How Kaito Works: From Social Analytics to Revenue Model
Kaito has been around longer than most realize, having raised funding about three years ago. The YAPS feature was introduced more recently, around November or December. Prior to YAPS, Kaito offered Pro analytics as a subscription service that many traders used to gauge where Twitter conversations and narratives were heading.
What makes Kaito particularly interesting now is its innovative business model. Projects can partner with Kaito to reward people who talk about their products in organic ways, all tracked through the YAPS system.
For example ANIME, IP/Story Protocol, and Berachain have already done airdrops to top YAPS earners, with allocations based on positions on the mindshare board.
The process works differently depending on whether projects are pre-TGE (Token Generation Event) or post-TGE:
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Post-TGE Companies: Can pay Kaito directly for monthly data feeds showing who's talking about their protocol. For example, Polkadot pays a monthly fee (estimated at $50-60k or potentially up to $100k) to see who has mindshare, and they give USDC to the mindshare leaderboards at the end of each month.
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Pre-TGE Projects: These typically need to win a vote to get a leaderboard, and often allocate a percentage of their token to top YAPS earners or voters.
The Risk-Free Opportunity
One of the most compelling aspects of participating in the Kaito ecosystem is the lack of risk involved. Unlike "trenching" (trading meme coins), which ICO Beast describes as "super minus EV gambling for the most part," creating content about protocols through Kaito only costs your time.
"If you've got three or four hours a day to dedicate to something, yeah, it might not be as fun to research and to use your brain and to write content, but it is no risk. All it is is your time," ICO Beast emphasizes. "On a risk-adjusted basis, [it's] probably one of the best things you could do."
Actionable Strategies for Maximizing Returns
If you're interested in capitalizing on this opportunity, ICO Beast recommends focusing on protocols that have announced reward systems with Kaito, such as Polkadot, Sophon, and Sei Network.
His advice for content creation:
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Avoid generic AI-generated content: "Avoid just these gross AI slop threads about whatever the protocol is because nobody wants to read that... the algorithm does a really good job of detecting that and nuking it."
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Try apps and share genuine experiences: "Go find some apps, go find some DeFi things that are on Polkadot. Try them out, take some screenshots, write a little bit of content, and say, 'Hey, I did this on Polkadot today. I thought it was kind of interesting.'"
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Tag relevant accounts: "Tag Polkadot, tag the protocol, maybe you'll get a like, maybe a retweet, maybe you'll get some interaction from them."
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Build genuine familiarity: "Become maybe not an expert, but at least become familiar with it, and talk about it. That's how you drive conversation."
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Be consistent: The rewards often come monthly, so consistency matters more than immediate results.
Understanding the Kaito Connect Voting Process
For pre-TGE projects to get a mindshare leaderboard, they need to win a vote on Kaito Connect. Voting takes place on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays each week, and whichever project has the most votes gets a pre-TGE leaderboard after a seven-day lag time.
Voting power is determined by:
- Your YAPS count
- NFTs you hold (Genesis NFTs and Smart Followers)
- Staked Kaito tokens
When you vote, your votes are locked for a week before being released back to you. While there's no direct incentive for voting, many projects operate on an "implied social contract" where if you vote for them, they'll try to reward you later with token allocations.
Wayfinder Example: Allocations to YAPS Earners
As a specific example, Wayfinder is allocating 0.25% of their token supply to "emerging YAPPers" (those with less than 1,000 smart followers) and approximately 2% of the total supply to social engagement overall.
The Kaito system appears to do a better job of measuring genuine influence than previous attempts like Pac Moon, which was purely impressions-based. As ICO Beast notes: "If you had a hundred thousand followers, spammed out five tweets and ended up with a million impressions, boom, you were at the top of the leaderboard... This, if you get some random that has no influence, no mindshare that comments on your stuff, it's not going to really have much of an impact."
The Future of Kaito and Bull Case
While Kaito's founder Yu Hu "keeps most of the actionable information pretty close to his chest," there are indications of potential future rewards. Approximately 70% of the season one airdrop tokens weren't claimed, and these will be rolled back into community rewards in some form.
The bull case for Kaito centers around its revenue-generating model:
"You look at Kaito, you see they're profitable... As long as they remain profitable, as long as they're continuing to be able to accumulate tokens, as long as projects want to use their analytics, there's no reason they can't continue generating this cash flow. And that's more attractive than 99% of crypto products because most of these things have no use case. They have no cash flow."
The emergence of competitors like Wallchain further validates that Kaito has "caught something really valuable," as ICO Beast points out: "People don't make derivatives of unsuccessful stuff."
Conclusion
For those looking to maximize opportunities in crypto without significant capital investment, Kaito presents a compelling option that rewards research, content creation, and genuine engagement. While it requires time and consistency, the risk-adjusted returns make it worth considering as part of a broader crypto strategy.