Coordination Effects
Okay I promised I’d keep writing this blog. Things have been busy. But here goes
In 2021 - there was the retail trading frenzy around GameStop. Apes Together Strong. But Apes were not together strong. Most meme stocks went to zero (especially Apes). The same thing largely happened to NFTs.
Some Lindy memes such as Tesla, Bitcoin and XRP did not collapse. And I believe that is due to the fact that they are not in fact about coordination effects. Tesla is about going to Mars. Bitcoin is about hating the debt driven society we’ve built. XRP is about being part of the future of finance. These ideas are not mostly about teaming up to stick it to the man or do anything together
Other than buying these assets, the holders don’t meaningfully communicate other than liking each others tweets or retweeting. While there are certainly community assets it’s not as tribal or as intense as NFT communities or the AMC Reddit threads where there would be long elaborate plans about working together to achieve some outcome
The problem with coordination effects is there’s always a central planner. Some ring leader in the middle. And most of the time - he’s not very smart. And the group is pretty loosely connected.
AI changes this fundamentally
- O3 is much smarter than your typical DAO manager
- AI generally can read the context of the group to figure out who can usefully work together
- AI can create and augment online content which groups of real people can promote (this is already starting with random individuals making really good studio grade VEO videos)
But what it boils down to is that collectives have intention and the only thing that’s being meaningfully traded on is attention, or lagged intention.
The level of nuance of alternative data systems provide isn’t nearly what is possible when you have a non stop stream of everybody’s daily activities, tool usage, and investment journals. If you get a group of people to contribute that - and those people represent the top 10% of global capability (and therefore the majority of spend) - the amount of extractable alpha from that cleaned data stream is enormous.
And if you create a token that allows all the members to see financial benefit from such sharing, then you have a true “apes together strong’ type movement that’s powered by AI not bullshit hype.
On X I was ranting about token churn dynamics. Hyperliquid, Binance and Solana, by default make their users lose money. This information is publicly available on Hyperliquid vaults but large scale studies of perp users show they on average deplete their accounts in 365 days. James Wynn, the anonymous Hyperliquid trader who lost $100m in a matter of months and has resorted to begging online is a very high profile but ultimately common example of leverage trading
Protocols like Grass sell their user data to model providers
At Post Fiat - our development corp, AGTI runs the task node. And if we make money from the “data lake” ie what the users contribute to, it all goes back to the protocol. Period. Not through data sales but through capital market operations such as running ETFs, hedge funds, or crypto vaults. This ensures that the value capture actually accrues to the community members
And unlike attention baed collection, post fiat will operate at the intention level which according to our analytics precedes buying intention for financial assets by about 48-78 hours. Similar findings in the digital ad industry show that people click about 7 articles before making a purchase decision on a financial asset
And unlike passive data collection strategy, ours will be active. This will be the biggest difference between Post Fiat and traditional hedge funds applying data to investing. By having an AI augmented collective, all kinds of group interactions on social media, sharing, audience attendance, and amplification of narratives becomes possible.
AI models are ultimately better at making great videos than they are extracting numbers out of financial documents. So leaning into the higher capability in media and coordination will deliver huge edge versus traditional pure play alternative data.
In summary - Post Fiat is going to take digital reflexivity - or the ability of a group to meaningfully provide data, collaborate intra group and with broader society via social platforms - to the absolute logical extreme. The most powerful alt data set of all time. And it’s not for sale except by buying Post Fiat tokens.