YAPE.CLUB: AI Weapon of Mass Attention
Great to meet you — we’re the Yape Team of Apes.
Some of us were behind the launch of Maneki AI Yield Agent in mid-May via Virtuals, which hit nearly 2000% oversubscription. It was a thrilling launch for a key insight that sparked our new thesis.
That thesis led us to build Yape.
Let us quickly walk you through the backstory, the conclusion we reached, and why we’re building what we’re building today.
As you probably know, Kaito has become the go-to infrastructure for measuring attention in crypto Twitter and Mindshare is now the leading indicator of a project's viability. Projects with high Mindshare attract more attention.
To build that mindshare, you need yappers — creators producing relevant, timely content that aligns with the narrative.
There’s been a growing wave of yapper squads and campaigns across DAOs, platforms, and Telegram groups. The highest density of this activity is arguably happening within Virtuals — something we experienced firsthand during the Maneki campaign.
Our campaign generated around 40,000 tweets — impressive. However, most of the content was low-effort, recycled material. It created big noise and appeared on Kaito leaderboards but failed to drive meaningful results or quality metrics like real users and product engagement.
At first, we assumed this was a Maneki-specific issue. But after talking to other teams in the attention-linked market, it became clear: this is a structural problem.
On one side, marketing teams expect these campaigns to convert — to drive activations, deposits, subscriptions, and eventually revenue. But the current quality of content and incentive structures don’t deliver.
On the other side, yappers want to monetize, but lack the tools, insights, and support to create meaningful informative content. Quality takes time, research, and skill and most campaigns don't reward that.
Instead, incentives get spread thin across growing numbers of participants, making high-quality effort irrational.
This dynamic hurts everyone:
So we’re at a fork in the road.
One path is to keep scaling — onboard more projects, funnel more money — but that just brings more yappers, and dilutes incentives further.