we are entering one of the best times for individuals to grow social presence and capitalize brand value - and the goal of Yaps has always been to reward such valuable voices. finding the balance between the aim of intended monetization and incidental farming is the trickiest part, and currently Yapper Leaderboard has swayed too far into allowing noise and farming - amplified by the proliferation of AI tools and X’s monetization push altogether, regardless of the existence of Kaito. so improvements and iterations will be a constant part of our roadmap, and I’m excited to announce the introduction of two major things, updates to Yapper Leaderboards, and gKAITO - both live in the coming weeks. Yapper Leaderboards have served as a valuable alternative to the historically opaque and performance-agnostic KOL distribution model. however, over time, certain negative externalities have emerged - namely noise, low-effort content, and an overemphasis on rewards (which is also on us). these dynamics have discouraged some genuinely strong accounts from participating and attracted lower-quality engagement. with all of these in mind, we are introducing a series of changes to the network, including a reputation threshold to all yapper leaderboards - coming live in a few weeks it’s a mechanism we’ve put a lot of consideration into, and it’s very much based on addressing the feedback we see across the timeline, both from Kaito community members and the wider crypto audience (very grateful for both negative and positive constructive feedback and flags). every single creator platform has a minimum threshold for creators to monetize - X requires 5 million impressions over last 3 months - TikTok is 10,000 followers and 100,000 video views - for Youtube it’s 4000 valid watch hours creators need to prove influence and impact prior to monetization, and a large part of this is to ensure equitable distribution, as well as to prevent low effort, low quality content from being able to participate which overall makes the network more attractive to all involved. you’ll be able to see the various elements we’re going to implement based on this in the tweet below. supplementing this, we wanted a way to involve the crypto community more widely in the Kaito ecosystem even if they aren’t more actively able to be involved - and this is through gKAITO. gKAITO represents the five core pillars of a project-community relationship: Thought Leadership, Attention, Participation, Ownership, and Culture. for us, the significance of the gKAITO mechanism is it brings together everyone, both in our ecosystem and the broader crypto space in a unified way. gKAITO then becomes the unified proof of contribution that allows all participants - of different degree - to benefit from the platform’s success in terms of fee sharing, priority access to deals, and more. overall, as we’ve always said in the past - improvements and iterations will be a constant part of our roadmap, especially for something brand new. the reality is, the incentive structure that worked yesterday may no longer work today, and the technology landscape is always changing. but this is exactly how we move the space forward - together. build. iterate. and keep moving.