---
type: claim
domain: internet-finance
description: "Surfacing meme tokens by social engagement signals (likes, shares, boosts, trading volume) rather than team-curated ordering creates a flywheel where organic attention drives liquidity, which drives more attention — producing verifiably crowd-sourced price discovery that insider-coordinated launches cannot replicate."
confidence: speculative
source: "Rio, extracted from Launchpet pitch via futard.io launch 2026-03-05"
created: 2026-03-12
depends_on:
  - "speculative markets aggregate information through incentive and selection effects not wisdom of crowds"
challenged_by: []
secondary_domains: [cultural-dynamics]
---

# Algorithm-driven social engagement creates attention-liquidity flywheels in meme token platforms where virality substitutes for insider coordination

Launchpet's Explore Page surfaces tokens based on a composite engagement signal: likes, shares, boosts, and trading volume. The mechanism is explicitly designed as an alternative to the current meme coin market structure where project teams and insiders coordinate launches to create artificial early volume that then attracts retail. Under Launchpet's design, no token can buy its way to the top of the feed except through genuine user behavior — every boost is paid, but the underlying engagement that earns organic placement is not.

The flywheel logic: a token that earns organic shares (because the pet photo is genuinely funny or charming) gets more Explore Page placement, which drives discovery by new users, which drives trading volume, which pushes the token further up the feed, which drives more shares. The cycle is self-reinforcing. Critically, it produces verifiable on-chain volume from real users, which is what crypto-native degens claim they want but cannot find in a market dominated by coordinated launches.

This design pattern — using social engagement as a price discovery proxy — is structurally novel for token markets. Traditional meme coin platforms (pump.fun, etc.) rank by trading volume alone, which insiders can manipulate. Instagram-style engagement ranking introduces a pre-trade signal that is harder to manufacture because it requires actual human attention and social sharing rather than capital deployment. If the signal is manipulation-resistant, it produces a market where genuine cultural virality becomes the primary value driver, replacing the insider coordination that currently dominates.

The claim is that attention-as-liquidity produces better price discovery outcomes for organic assets than volume-as-liquidity. This is analogous to the claim that futarchy produces better governance outcomes than token voting — both replace manipulable aggregation mechanisms with harder-to-game alternatives.

## Evidence

- **Primary**: Launchpet pitch — "An algorithm-driven Explore Page surfaces tokens based on likes, shares, boosts, and trading volume. The more engagement a pet gets, the more it appears in the feed, the more people buy it, the faster it grows. Attention becomes liquidity."
- **Market diagnosis**: "Crypto-natives are starving for organic runners. The market has become predictable and over-engineered, dominated by insider-coordinated launches." (Launchpet pitch, 2026-03-05)
- **Design contrast**: pump.fun and similar platforms rank tokens primarily by volume — a metric insiders can purchase. Engagement ranking requires real user behavior that scales differently
- **Analogous mechanisms**: TikTok For You Page, Instagram Explore — both use engagement signals to surface content and have demonstrated flywheel dynamics at scale in non-financial contexts

## Challenges

- Social engagement signals are also gameable: bots can like and share, paid influencers can manufacture "organic" attention
- The mechanism is untested in a financial context at scale; social virality in entertainment does not guarantee financial virality in token markets
- The correlation between engagement signals and genuine price discovery quality is assumed, not demonstrated
- Launchpet has not launched; the flywheel has not been observed

---

Relevant Notes:
- [[speculative markets aggregate information through incentive and selection effects not wisdom of crowds]] — engagement-based ranking is a selection mechanism, not wisdom-of-crowds; its information aggregation properties depend on who is doing the engaging
- [[futarchy-governed-meme-coins-attract-speculative-capital-at-scale]] — CULT's success was driven by organic community attention; attention-liquidity dynamics were visible even without an algorithmic surface
- [[embedding-charitable-donations-in-protocol-fee-structures-creates-retention-through-identity-formation-turning-traders-into-evangelists]] — charitable mechanism reinforces sharing behavior that feeds the engagement flywheel

Topics:
- [[_map]]
