Counting what gets cheap > pricing what gets scarce.
Invert. Always invert.
Intelligence is becoming abundant. Content, analysis, code, persuasion. All trending to zero cost.
@RibbitCapital'sToken Letter runs the inversion in plain sight and asks the only question that matters: if AI makes all of this abundant, what turns out to be scarce?
Two things. Attention and Truth.
When no human is needed to make something worth reading, the scarce asset is whatever still holds "a gaze". And when agents stream content to niches of one, 24/7, the scarce asset is knowing what is real. Half the planet already reports little to no trust in the news and the flood has not even started.
Here is the part the market is not looking at, yet.
We will not read through the noise ourselves. We will send AI agents to do it. They might even discern truth and allocate our attention, one day. Well, those agents need sources that are real-time and verifiable or they are just laundering the same noise back at us.
Markets are already forming to supply exactly that.
The Economist and the Washington Post had the race a dead heat. Polymarket and Kalshi had Trump near 60% and were right. Over 50B across 700 protocols, nodes paid to report the truth and slashed for lying.
A newspaper for machines is being typeset right now. Prediction markets on the front page. Oracles on the price feeds. Curation protocols on the masthead.
But every newspaper needs an editor the reader can TRUST.
For an agent, trusting a source is not a "subjective feeling". It's a lookup. Humans qualify information through brands, personal and institutional. Agents need a machine-legible version of the same thing. Reputation. Verification. Provenance you can query before you ACT.
Here is the part people keep missing about KYA.
It was never a payments feature. It's the answer to one question, asked everywhere an agent has to decide what to trust. An agent paying another agent. An agent reading a price feed. An agent picking a side in a prediction market. Identity, reputation, verification, provenance. Same primitive for different surfaces.
The thing that decides which truth market an agent believes is the same thing that decides which agent it pays.
You already know what layer that is.
The paper that started all of this was called Attention Is All You Need and I believe that for the the markets of the next decade, this title is going to read a lot more literally than its authors intended.
Make of that what you will.
🐸 AD MAIORA,
$TIBBIR! 🌊