Skip to main content

InfoFi Revolution: How Information Became a $649M Tradeable Asset Class

· 11 min read
Dora Noda
Dora Noda
Software Engineer

When Intercontinental Exchange—the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange—backed Polymarket with a $2 billion investment in 2025, Wall Street sent a clear signal: information itself has become a tradeable financial asset. This wasn't just another crypto investment. It was the traditional finance world's acceptance of InfoFi (Information Finance), a paradigm shift where knowledge, attention, data credibility, and prediction signals transform into monetizable on-chain assets.

The numbers tell a compelling story. The InfoFi market reached $649 million in valuation by late 2025, with prediction markets alone generating over $27.9 billion in trading volume between January and October. Meanwhile, stablecoin circulation surpassed $300 billion, processing $4 trillion in the first seven months of 2025—an 83% year-over-year jump. These aren't isolated trends. They're converging into a fundamental reimagining of how information flows, how trust is established, and how value is exchanged in the digital economy.

The Birth of Information Finance​

InfoFi emerged from a simple but powerful observation: in the attention economy, information has measurable value, yet most of that value is captured by centralized platforms rather than by the individuals who create, curate, or verify it. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin popularized the concept in a 2024 blog post, outlining InfoFi's "potential to create better implementations of social media, science, news, governance, and other fields."

The core innovation lies in transforming intangible information flows into tangible financial instruments. By utilizing blockchain's transparency, AI's analytical power, and the scalability of big data, InfoFi assigns market value to information that was previously difficult to monetize. This includes everything from prediction signals and data credibility to user attention and reputation scores.

The InfoFi market currently segments into six key categories:

  1. Prediction Markets: Platforms like Polymarket allow users to buy shares in the outcomes of future events. The price fluctuates based on collective market belief, effectively turning knowledge into a tradeable financial asset. Polymarket recorded over $18 billion in trading volume throughout 2024 and 2025, and famously predicted the 2024 U.S. presidential election with 95% accuracy—several hours before the Associated Press made the official call.

  2. Yap-to-Earn: Social platforms that monetize user-generated content and engagement directly through token economics, redistributing attention value to creators rather than centralizing it in platform shareholders.

  3. Data Analytics and Insights: Kaito stands as the leading platform in this space, generating $33 million in annual revenue through its advanced data analytics platform. Founded by former Citadel portfolio manager Yu Hu, Kaito has attracted $10.8 million in funding from Dragonfly, Sequoia Capital China, and Spartan Group.

  4. Attention Markets: Tokenizing and trading user attention as a scarce resource, allowing advertisers and content creators to directly purchase engagement.

  5. Reputation Markets: On-chain reputation systems where credibility itself becomes a tradeable commodity, with financial incentives aligned to accuracy and trustworthiness.

  6. Paid Content: Decentralized content platforms where information itself is tokenized and sold directly to consumers without intermediary platforms taking massive cuts.

Prediction Markets: The "Truth Machine" of Web3​

If InfoFi is about turning information into assets, prediction markets represent its purest form. These platforms use blockchain and smart contracts to let users trade on outcomes of real-world events—elections, sports, economic indicators, even crypto prices. The mechanism is elegant: if you believe an event will happen, you buy shares. If it occurs, you profit. If not, you lose your stake.

Polymarket's performance in the 2024 U.S. presidential election showcased the power of aggregated market intelligence. The platform not only called the race hours before traditional media but also predicted outcomes in swing states like Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada more accurately than polling aggregators. This wasn't luck—it was the wisdom of crowds, financially incentivized and cryptographically secured.

The trust mechanism here is crucial. Polymarket operates on the Polygon blockchain, offering low transaction fees and fast settlement times. It's non-custodial, meaning the platform doesn't hold user funds. Operations are transparent and automated via blockchain, making the system censorship-resistant and trustless. Smart contracts automatically execute payouts when events conclude, removing the need for trusted intermediaries.

However, the model isn't without challenges. Chaos Labs, a crypto risk management firm, estimated that wash trading—where traders simultaneously buy and sell the same asset to artificially inflate volume—could account for up to a third of Polymarket's trading during the 2024 presidential campaign. This highlights a persistent tension in InfoFi: the economic incentives that make these markets powerful can also make them vulnerable to manipulation.

Regulatory clarity arrived in 2025 when the U.S. Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) formally ended investigations into Polymarket without bringing new charges. Shortly after, Polymarket acquired QCEX, a CFTC-licensed derivatives exchange and clearinghouse, for $112 million, enabling legal operations within the United States under regulatory compliance. By February 2026, Polymarket's valuation reached $9 billion.

In January 2026, the Public Integrity in Financial Prediction Markets Act (H.R. 7004) was introduced to ban federal officials from trading on non-public information, ensuring the "purity of data" in these markets. This legislative framework underscores an important reality: prediction markets aren't just crypto experiments—they're becoming recognized infrastructure for information discovery.

Stablecoins: The Rails Powering Web3 Payments​

While InfoFi represents the what—tradeable information assets—stablecoins provide the how: the payment infrastructure enabling instant, low-cost, global transactions. The stablecoin market's evolution from crypto-native settlement to mainstream payment infrastructure mirrors InfoFi's trajectory from niche experiment to institutional adoption.

Stablecoin transaction volume exceeded $27 trillion annually in 2025, with USDT (Tether) and USDC (Circle) controlling 94% of the market and accounting for 99% of payment volume. Monthly payment flows surpassed $10 billion, with business transactions representing 63% of total volume. This shift from speculative trading to real economic utility marks a fundamental maturation of the technology.

Mastercard's integration exemplifies the infrastructure buildout. The payments giant now enables stablecoin spending at more than 150 million merchant locations via its existing card network. Users link their stablecoin balances to virtual or physical Mastercard cards, with automatic conversion at the point of sale. This seamless bridge between crypto and traditional finance was unthinkable just two years ago.

Circle Payments Network has emerged as critical infrastructure, connecting financial institutions, digital challenger banks, payment companies, and digital wallets to process payments instantly across currencies and markets. Circle reports over 100 financial institutions in the pipeline, with products including Circle Gateway for cross-chain liquidity and Arc, a blockchain designed specifically for enterprise-grade stablecoin payments.

The GENIUS Act, signed into law in 2025, provided the first federal framework governing U.S. payment stablecoins. It established clear standards for licensing, reserves, consumer protections, and ongoing oversight—regulatory certainty that has unlocked institutional capital and engineering resources.

Primary networks for stablecoin transfers include Ethereum, Tron, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Solana, and Base. This multi-chain infrastructure ensures redundancy, specialization (e.g., Solana for high-frequency, low-value transactions; Ethereum for high-value, security-critical transfers), and competitive dynamics that drive down costs.

Oracle Networks: The Bridge Between Worlds​

For InfoFi and Web3 payments to scale, blockchain applications need reliable access to real-world data. Oracle networks provide this critical infrastructure, acting as bridges between on-chain smart contracts and off-chain information sources.

Chainlink's Runtime Environment (CRE), announced in November 2025, represents a watershed moment. This all-in-one orchestration layer unlocks institutional-grade smart contracts for onchain finance. Leading financial institutions including Swift, Euroclear, UBS, Kinexys by J.P. Morgan, Mastercard, AWS, Google Cloud, Aave's Horizon, and Ondo are adopting CRE to capture what the Boston Consulting Group estimates as an $867 trillion tokenization opportunity.

The scale is staggering: the World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, 10% of global GDP will be stored on blockchain, with tokenized illiquid assets reaching approximately $16 trillion. These projections assume robust oracle infrastructure that can reliably feed data on asset prices, identity verification, regulatory compliance, and event outcomes into smart contracts.

Oracle technology is also evolving beyond static data delivery. Modern oracles like Chainlink now use AI to deliver predictive data rather than just historical snapshots. The APRO (AT) token, officially listed on November 5, 2025, represents this next generation: infrastructure aimed at bridging reliable real-world data with blockchain-powered applications across DeFi, AI, RWAs (Real World Assets), and prediction markets.

Given the $867 trillion in financial assets that could be tokenized (per World Economic Forum estimates), oracle networks aren't just infrastructure—they're the nervous system of the emerging tokenized economy. Without reliable data feeds, smart contracts can't function. With them, the entire global financial system can potentially migrate on-chain.

The Convergence: Data, Finance, and Trust​

The real innovation isn't InfoFi alone, or stablecoins alone, or oracles alone. It's the convergence of these technologies into a cohesive system where information flows freely, value settles instantly, and trust is cryptographically enforced rather than institutionally mediated.

Consider a near-future scenario: A prediction market (InfoFi layer) uses oracle data feeds (data layer) to settle outcomes, with payouts processed in USDC via Circle Payments Network (payment layer), automatically converted to local currency via Mastercard (bridge layer) at 150 million global merchants. The user experiences instant, trustless, low-cost settlement. The system operates 24/7 without intermediaries.

This isn't speculation. The infrastructure is live and scaling. The regulatory frameworks are being established. The institutional capital is committed. Years of experimentation with blockchain-based transactions are giving way to concrete infrastructure, regulatory frameworks, and institutional commitment that could push Web3 payments into everyday commerce by 2026.

Industry analysts expect 2026 to mark the inflection point, with landmark events including the launch of the first cross-border tokenized securities settlement network led by a major Wall Street bank. By 2026, the internet will think, verify, and move money automatically through one shared system, where AI makes decisions, blockchains prove them, and payments enforce them instantly without human middlemen.

The Road Ahead: Challenges and Opportunities​

Despite the momentum, significant challenges remain. Wash trading and market manipulation persist in prediction markets. Stablecoin infrastructure still faces banking access issues in many jurisdictions. Oracle networks are potential single points of failure—critical infrastructure that, if compromised, could cascade failures across interconnected smart contracts.

Regulatory uncertainty persists outside the U.S., with different jurisdictions taking vastly different approaches to crypto classification, stablecoin issuance, and prediction market legality. The European Union's MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets) regulation, the UK's stablecoin framework proposals, and Asia-Pacific's fragmented approach create a complex global landscape.

User experience remains a barrier to mainstream adoption. Despite infrastructure improvements, most users still find wallet management, private key security, and cross-chain operations intimidating. Abstracting this complexity without sacrificing security or decentralization is an ongoing design challenge.

Yet the trajectory is unmistakable. Information is becoming liquid. Payments are becoming instant and global. Trust is being algorithmically enforced. The $649 million InfoFi market is just the beginning—a proof of concept for a much larger transformation.

When the New York Stock Exchange's parent company invests $2 billion in a prediction market, it's not betting on speculation. It's betting on infrastructure. It's recognizing that information, properly structured and incentivized, isn't just valuable—it's tradeable, verifiable, and foundational to the next iteration of global finance.

The Web3 payment revolution isn't coming. It's here. And it's being built on the bedrock of information as an asset class.

Sources:

Share on Twitter