---
type: claim
domain: internet-finance
description: "Routing likes, shares, and boosts into algorithmic token ranking means engagement generates visibility, visibility generates buyers, and buyers generate volume — collapsing the distinction between social attention and financial demand."
confidence: speculative
source: "rio, based on Launchpet product design (futardio launch 2026-03-05): Explore Page algorithm routing engagement signals into token discovery"
created: 2026-03-11
depends_on:
  - "cryptos primary use case is capital formation not payments or store of value because permissionless token issuance solves the fundraising bottleneck that solo founders and small teams face"
challenged_by:
  - "Engagement signals are gameable through coordinated liking/sharing, making the flywheel a vector for manipulation rather than organic price discovery"
  - "Launchpet's fundraise failed (3.5% funded), so the flywheel design is unvalidated — the claim is architectural, not empirical"
---

# Social engagement signals embedded in token discovery algorithms create an attention-to-liquidity flywheel where popularity reinforces price momentum

Launchpet's core mechanism is an algorithm-driven Explore Page that surfaces tokens based on likes, shares, boosts, and trading volume. Their framing: "Attention becomes liquidity." The structural claim being made is not just a UX choice — it is a new price discovery mechanism where social engagement functions as a pre-financial signal that routes speculative capital to high-engagement tokens before organic volume has accumulated.

The mechanism: a token that receives social engagement (likes, shares, boosts from creators or holders) rises in the Explore Page feed. More visibility means more potential buyers encounter the token. More buyers means more trading volume. More trading volume feeds back into the algorithm as a ranking signal. The loop is: engagement → visibility → buyers → volume → more engagement. The asset's price emerges from this social-financial reflexivity, not from independent valuation.

This collapses a distinction that traditional capital markets maintain carefully: the separation between marketing/hype and asset fundamentals. In traditional markets, retail buying based on social attention (meme stocks, WSB-driven pumps) is an aberration that creates temporary dislocations. In an attention-to-liquidity design, social engagement IS the fundamental — there is no independent value anchor against which social hype can be measured as an excess.

The design is most coherent for assets that have no independent fundamental value — pet tokens, meme coins, community tokens where the token's worth IS the community's collective attention. In those cases, a mechanism that makes social engagement directly tradeable is not misaligned with the asset's nature — it is the right market mechanism for the asset type.

The implications for platform design: paid boosts (tiered visibility promotions) become a direct mechanism for creators to purchase price momentum, not just marketing reach. This creates a secondary market in attention allocation that is orthogonal to the token's on-chain fundamentals.

## Evidence

- **Primary source**: Launchpet product description (2026-03-05 futardio launch): "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."
- **Design detail**: Paid boosts = "tiered visibility promotions on the Explore Page" — attention is explicitly purchasable
- **Note**: This is an architectural claim from the project's design documents. The Launchpet fundraise failed (3.5% funded), so the mechanism has not been validated in production.

## Challenges

- **Unvalidated**: Launchpet did not successfully raise capital, meaning the design was never deployed. The flywheel is theoretical.
- **Manipulation surface**: Likes and shares are cheap to fake at scale. Without Sybil-resistant engagement signals, the algorithm can be gamed to surface low-quality tokens with coordinated social manipulation.
- **pump.fun precedent**: pump.fun already demonstrated that low-friction token creation with social dynamics produces mostly losses for retail buyers — the attention-to-liquidity mechanic may amplify rather than solve this problem.
- **Attention is zero-sum**: In a feed-based discovery model, more tokens competing for the same feed real estate means average visibility per token falls as platform grows, degrading the flywheel's per-token effectiveness at scale.

---

Relevant Notes:
- [[cryptos primary use case is capital formation not payments or store of value because permissionless token issuance solves the fundraising bottleneck that solo founders and small teams face]] — attention-to-liquidity is a new capital formation mechanism for assets without fundamental value anchors
- [[permissionless-futarchy-launches-show-extreme-funding-variance-because-investor-discrimination-operates-without-curation]] — the Launchpet launch that this mechanism was designed for

Topics:
- [[_map]]
