Opinions Matter

by Leon and Simon

For the past two decades, the internet has been organized around content - who can produce it, distribute it, and monetize it. And the internet was once a place for authentic self-expression. 

In the early days of blogs, forums, and Twitter, people expressed what they really thought. Whether you were sharing a hot take, an unpopular opinion, or a half-baked theory at 2 am.

But this is not true anymore. AI has commoditized content. ChatGPT can write a PhD-level article on any topic. Bot farms can mass-produce tweets, Reddit posts, Medium essays, and entire YouTube channels. Social media engagement - likes, shares, comments - can be purchased, simulated, or simply generated by LLMs fine-tuned on sentiment patterns.

We’ve entered a new era: The Signal Crisis. 

We see it as a new kind of information breakdown where the quantity of content is higher than ever, but the trustworthiness of sentiment is near zero. Opinions lose weight, narratives blur, and truth becomes unknowable.

Rebuilding Reputation in the Post-Content Era

We’ve tried moderation, identity layers, fact-checking and content filters. But none of these tools made the difference. Right now, it costs almost nothing to generate content. And when something is free to produce, it loses all meaning. So the question is how to add meaning again?

If the missing ingredient is economic weight, then the solution demands crypto. No system is better at turning intangible value into markets. Together with our incubated portfolio company Opinions.fun, we thought about this a lot. And the idea is simple: if belief is the unit of culture today, then it should be possible to trade it.

We're now calling for a new financial market: opinion markets.

Opinion markets are all about “put your money where your mouth is”, “have skin in the game or stfu”, “talk is cheap, conviction isn’t”. 

Opinion markets are the solution to the cultural shift in a world where beliefs, not facts, drives behavior. In a digital world which is overrun by synthetic content and emotional overstimulation, opinion markets deliver: 

1. a filter for real opinions

A mechanism that allows a new generation of KOLs to emerge. Not those who tweet for virality, but those who are consistently right or have genuine conviction behind their views. It is about accountability and performance, not clicks. 

2. a vehicle for identity expression

Not only for the individual opinion originator, but also for communities that form around shared convictions creating organic tribes of belief. The alignment around a view becomes an identity marker and a way to build collective reputation. 

3. a platform for narrative speculation

Mercenary traders that are skilled at predicting narratives and trends. They turn narratives into assets not holding deep conviction but caring about momentum, flows and frontrunning emerging trends.

We are living in an era of emotionalized digital consumption where people buy collectibles not for utility, but for identity and status. The young generation does not anymore engage with content for information, but identity and status. 

This is relevant especially in a world where “how i feel about this” is more relevant than “what’s true”. And that’s why opinion tokens can become a powerful behavioral alignment. 

The primitives evolve but the desire stays the same: status, identity and meaning. NFTs were the first way to express your identity and status. They were cultural signals. Memecoins shifted this from static flexing to real-time tribalism. They became symbols of shared jokes and memes and internet belief systems. Opinion tokens add even more depth with onchain culture becoming sharper, faster and more expressive. What you believe will matter. 

From Market to Media

Opinion markets can become sybil-resistant belief systems. Instead of focusing on what is being said, the focus becomes who is buying into it and how much. This leads to:

• a reputation layer for thinkers, influencers and intellectuals

• a discovery mechanism for emerging narratives 

• a dashboard for truth and signal in a noisy world 

Thereby, opinion markets naturally evolve into a new kind of social platform. 

Instead of another speculative trading platform, it becomes a social platform built on shared beliefs, intellectual risk-taking and memetic alignment. 

The user’s portfolio becomes a social profile expressing what they believed in, when they started to believe in it, how often they were early or late, how big the conversation was. 

A social graph that is native, dynamic and deeply expressive. People who consistently back the same ideas begin to perform opinion clusters. A belief-based social graph: more accurate than follows and more meaningful than likes. 

This sets the stage for building new social platforms on top and can flip the model of traditional social media: from content-first to conviction-first, from vanity metrics to proof of belief, from followers to shared belief with stake in it. This flips the architecture of social networks on its head. Instead of clout chasing, you get credibility through conviction. Instead of algorithms guessing what you like, your beliefs form your feed.

From Chaos to Credibility

In the end, opinion markets are more than just financial tools. They can help to answer one of the most important questions of our social media era: who believes what and where lies the truth? 

In this way, opinion markets give us a way to bring meaning back - and to make belief scarce again.

They filter the chaos of content into a usable signal layer. They give humans a way to assert meaning in an AI-saturated world. And they turn intellectual risk-taking into a new form of social capital.

We don’t need more noise, more feeds, or more engagement. 

Opinions matter. 

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Who We Are

Moonrock Capital is a Blockchain Advisory and Investment Firm, incubating and accelerating early stage startups since 2019.

Disclaimer: None of the information contained here constitutes an offer (or solicitation of an offer) to buy or sell any currency, product or financial instrument, to make any investment, or to participate in any particular trading strategy.