Author: Changan I Biteye Content Team
Forecasting platforms are beginning to show more and more markets that have never been seen before, such as:
How many posts will Trump make on Truth Social this week?
Will Musk tweet more than 300 times in the next 7 days?
When people first see this type of market, their reactions are usually similar: Who would actually play this game?
Interestingly, these markets not only have active participants, but also consistently maintain stable trading volumes. Just two days ago, Predict Fun launched the "Xhunt KOL Ranking" market, and its trading volume immediately surged to the top three on Predict Fun's trading platform.
This article will start by explaining the underlying logic of the tweet market, showing you what this market is really betting on, and why "attention" is becoming a new asset in the prediction market.
Why are prediction platforms starting to enter the attention market?
The rules of the attention market are very straightforward: bet on which range of tweets a person will post within a certain period, and pay out based on the actual data at settlement.
At first glance, this kind of question seems absurd. Who would care how many tweets someone posts in a week?
But upon closer examination, it becomes clear that the number of posts is never an isolated phenomenon. In particular, the frequency of posts by politicians, business leaders, and top KOLs is itself a part of the changes in the real world.
Trump's example is a typical case: Polymarket has long had a market for tracking the number of Trump's posts on Truth Social, and this number can, to some extent, reflect Trump's political status and the pace of public opinion that week.
During the weeks when the US-Iran conflict escalated, the frequency of posts from the White House account and Trump himself increased significantly, as he needed to continuously communicate to influence public opinion and market expectations. Conversely, when negotiations entered a sensitive phase and strategic ambiguity was required, the pace of posting tended to slow down noticeably.
Polymarket later went even further and created a market for "what words Trump will mention in his speeches," which is essentially the same logic: the market starts trading the information flow itself.
Similar situations have occurred with other public figures:
Zelensky: His posts are relatively stable when the front lines are stable and diplomacy is quiet, but he speaks out frequently when the front lines are tense and international support is urgently needed.
Musk: The situation is slightly different; his posting pace is more driven by personal attention and the popularity of the topic.
Therefore, the number of posts is just surface data. What the market is really betting on are the external variables that drive the changes in this number: policies, wars, public opinion, regulation, emotions, and attention itself.
II. Predict.fun launched a new attention marketplace.
This week, the Predict.fun platform launched two prediction marketplaces based on XHunt leaderboards: "Who will be number one on the XHunt Chinese KOL list?" and "Who will be number one on the XHunt English KOL list?"
2.1 Why are these two markets worth paying attention to?
For a prediction market to function, three conditions are essentially required:
The outcome must involve uncertainty.
The result must be able to reflect some valuable information.
The result must be difficult to manipulate.
The KOL ranking list happens to meet all three conditions:
1️⃣ Rankings are inherently unpredictable.
In the world of crypto, narratives change very quickly. Today the market is focused on AI, tomorrow it may turn to stablecoins, and the day after tomorrow it may switch directions rapidly due to a certain exchange, a regulatory news item, or a KOL's statement.
In a multi-faceted game, whether a KOL can top the rankings depends not only on how much content they publish, but also on whether there are enough people in the market willing to discuss them. This makes the ranking results naturally predictable.
2️⃣ The ranking list is not a meaningless ranking of popularity; it reflects the flow of market attention.
In the crypto market, attention is a very important resource.
Why does Meme increase? Because of focused attention.
Why does the narrative emerge? Because of attention shift.
Why do projects need KOLs? Because attention can be converted into users, liquidity, and market consensus.
3️⃣ The result must not be easily manipulated.
Once enough capital enters the prediction market, people will try to influence the results. Rankings that rely solely on page views or likes can be manipulated by buying traffic, rendering the market meaningless.
This is also the biggest difference between KOL ranking markets and markets like "Which app will top the Apple Store free chart?": the latter's settlement is based on a number that can be directly purchased, while the former relies on the real discussion behavior of the entire community.
Therefore, when a KOL becomes number one on the rankings in a particular week, it essentially means that they have captured a stronger market mindshare during that period.
However, in the past, such signals were difficult to quantify: everyone knew that "this person is very popular recently," but no one could give a clear answer as to how popular they were or how much more popular they were than last week.
XHunt turns this intuition into data: by tracking KOLs' posting frequency, interaction volume, dissemination intensity, and community reach, it transforms the previously vague "attention perception" into a weekly ranking that can be observed, compared, and verified. Attention is no longer just a feeling; it has concrete rankings and numbers.
But data alone is not enough. Data can only tell you what has happened. What the prediction market needs to do is to let people price what will happen.
Predict.fun built a trading market based on XHunt's data: allowing anyone with an understanding of attention flows to turn their judgment into a verifiable position.
2.2 In-depth analysis of the KOL ranking market
1️⃣From the perspective of trading volume, the attractiveness of this type of market has begun to emerge.
These two attention marketplaces, based on the XHunt KOL rankings, garnered approximately $630,000 and $113,000 in trading volume, respectively, after launching on May 6.
In contrast, the trading volume in the culture section of Predict.fun is slightly lower, which suggests that users are not just interested in "how many tweets someone will post," but are more willing to trade a more comprehensive and informative result.
Even compared to Polymarkets, it's not inferior; the "Musk's Posts from May 8th to May 15th" market currently has a trading volume of 920,000. This newly launched market already boasts a trading volume of about 70% of Polymarkets' leading markets of its kind.
Compared to the sheer number of posts, the KOL ranking contains a wealth of information. It not only reflects whether an individual posts frequently, but also whether their content has been disseminated, sparked community discussion, and whether their influence has truly spread to a wider audience.
2️⃣ From the perspective of the fairness of the rules, XHunt has made public the ranking algorithm of the KOL ranking list and recorded the historical results on the blockchain, which makes this market more verifiable.
According to the official ranking algorithm, the system first filters candidate accounts from the KOL interaction network, then counts the dissemination signals such as citations, reposts, and replies received by the relevant tweets of these accounts, and calculates the overall popularity by combining factors such as interaction intensity, the scope of accounts involved in the dissemination, and the content diffusion effect. At the same time, the system will also filter out duplicate interactions, self-interactions, etc., and finally sort them by overall popularity within the same category and time range.
Therefore, the XHunt ranking is closer to an attention dissemination index, which places more emphasis on the actual dissemination quality of each piece of content than simply the number of posts.
Furthermore, XHunt will store the ranking results on the blockchain, ensuring that each historical ranking has a traceable and verifiable public record. For prediction markets, this means that the KOL ranking is not just an internal platform display of popularity, but an external data source that can serve as a basis for market settlement.
Therefore, from a deeper perspective, Predict.fun's launch this time is not just about two simple "guess the list" markets, but also an attempt to introduce social attention index into the prediction market.
2.3 Trading Tips: Historical Data Review of XHunt KOL Rankings
Looking at XHunt's historical leaderboards, you'll find that those who top the charts are often the people who dominate market discussion that week, rather than simply those who post the most. The reasons behind different individuals reaching the top correspond to completely different market narratives.
Therefore, for users participating in the KOL ranking market, what is really worth observing is not whether a person posts frequently, but whether any new narratives have started to spread recently.
These changes often occur before the final rankings are finalized.
1️⃣ English Section: Musk and the Weekly Narrative
Musk is almost always at the top of the English-speaking charts, but the narrative that drives him to the top is different every week.
April 20: The main content was a post about currency, which sparked a lot of discussion in the crypto community.
April 27: Grok launched its imagination feature, and AI storytelling gained momentum. He was among the first to speak out.
May 4: SpaceX's early Starlink teaser, extending the topic from AI to space.
Although Musk topped the charts for three consecutive weeks, the sources of attention he garnered were different. Different narratives, including AI, space, encryption, and politics, all gained further traction through his account.
2️⃣Chinese-speaking region: New book launches and breaking news
CZ's two ascents to the top followed similar logic:
April 20: That week, CZ shared the New York Post's review of his autobiography on social media, sparking a surge in community discussion.
April 27: The print version of the memoir was officially released, and the topic naturally continued, with almost all the traffic in the Chinese-speaking crypto community that week focused on this matter.
The week of May 4th was completely different. Dr. Wang topped the charts with a video of a medical couple providing emergency care on a beach in Wanning, currently boasting an astonishing 17.5 MB of views. Although the video contained no cryptocurrency information, its strong emotional resonance led to its spontaneous spread within the Chinese-speaking community.
These two models illustrate that the rankings don't solely belong to the long-term top performers; unexpected events can reshuffle the list at any time. What truly determines the rankings is who is most likely to generate widespread community buzz that week.
From an observational perspective, the core variables in this type of market are not simply the frequency of posting, but rather the spread of trending topics, narrative shifts, and the intensity of community discussions.
In conclusion: Information is beginning to enter the market.
Over the past year, InfoFi has become an important trend in the crypto market. Its core logic is that information itself has value, dissemination itself has value, and influence itself has value.
However, most InfoFi products in the past have remained at the stage of "displaying information": information mining, social scoring, KOL ranking, and content incentives. These tools can tell you what has happened, but rarely allow users to price "what will happen next".
Products like predict.fun have taken this a step further: they don't just showcase informational value, but bring that value to the market.
The crypto market has always been highly dependent on narrative and attention: prices reflect the flow of funds, trading volume reflects trading behavior, but often, what changes earlier is actually the flow of information itself.
A certain topic suddenly became the focus of discussion;
The spread of a certain KOL has accelerated significantly;
A certain narrative has begun to appear frequently in the community.
These changes often occur before prices. Observe changes in information and attention before prices change.
So the truly interesting thing about the Influence Market is not that it predicts a ranking, but that it provides a new market perspective.
You might think the market is betting on who will post more content, but often, what users are really trading is the event's popularity, its spread, and where the market's attention might go next.
