Kaito Yaps Discontinued: What Changed and the Alternatives

In January 2026, Kaito sunset Yaps — its public post-to-earn program that turned crypto posting into a visible attention score. If you used Yaps to gauge which projects and creators were winning mindshare, the signal you relied on has moved. This is a plain explainer of what Yaps was, what changed, what it means for tracking attention now, and the alternatives worth using in its place.

What Yaps actually was

Yaps was Kaito's attention-rewards program. In simple terms, it scored crypto posts on X for “smart” engagement — not just likes and reposts, but whether an account with real reach and relevance was talking about a given project. Accounts earned Yaps points for quality posting, and those points rolled up into leaderboards you could read two ways: per creator (who is earning the most attention) and per project (which tokens are capturing the conversation).

That dual read is why Yaps became a de facto mindshare gauge. Projects ran incentive campaigns tied to Yaps to bootstrap awareness, creators chased leaderboard placement, and researchers used the project boards as a rough proxy for “where is attention concentrating right now.” It was a clever loop: reward the posting, measure the attention the posting creates, and publish the ranking.

The loop also had well-known limits. Because Yaps rewarded posting, it created an incentive to post — which is exactly the behavior it was measuring. Campaign season could inflate a project's board with engagement-farming rather than genuine conviction, and the score was X-centric, so it captured broadcast attention better than the slower, more skeptical conversation on Reddit, YouTube, or news.

What changed in January 2026

Kaito discontinued Yaps as a standalone attention-rewards program and moved the underlying attention work into its broader product line: Kaito Pro (its research and pro-tier terminal), Studio (its content and campaign tooling), and Attention Markets (its newer attention-as-an- asset surface). The short version: the free, gamified “earn Yaps by posting” layer went away, and attention became a feature inside products rather than a public points program.

This is a repositioning, not a data deletion. Kaito still works on attention and mindshare — arguably more seriously, since it is now tied to paid products rather than a free rewards loop. But the specific thing many people relied on, an open leaderboard you could glance at to read project and creator mindshare, is no longer running in that form.

Who is affected, and how

The impact splits by how you used Yaps:

• Creators who earned Yaps: the post-to-earn incentive and the public creator leaderboard are gone. Reach still matters, but the specific scoreboard and its rewards no longer exist as before. To keep tracking your standing versus other crypto voices, you need a separate influencer ranking.
• Projects that ran Yaps campaigns: attention campaigns now route through Kaito's paid product line rather than a free points program. Budgeting and measurement move into those products, and the open project board you pointed your community at is no longer the same public artifact.
• Researchers and traders: the project mindshare board you used as a free proxy for “where attention is concentrating” is the biggest loss. This is the easiest gap to fill, because a mindshare leaderboard does not need a rewards program behind it — it just needs to measure share of conversation.

How to read mindshare without Yaps

The useful idea behind Yaps — share of crypto conversation — does not depend on a post-to-earn loop. Mindshare is simply the percentage of relevant crypto discussion a token, project, or narrative captures over a window. You can measure that directly from the conversation itself, without paying creators to generate it.

Ruma's crypto mindshare leaderboard does exactly this. It reads crypto posts across X, Reddit, YouTube, and news with large language models and ranks tokens and narratives by share of attention. Because it is not tied to a rewards program, the board is less exposed to the “post to earn, then measure the posting” feedback loop that could inflate a Yaps campaign. It is a free public page, so it can serve the same quick “who is winning attention right now” read many people used Yaps for.

One important nuance: mindshare is attention, not approval. A token can top a mindshare board because it is controversial, being liquidated, or the subject of a security scare. That is why it helps to pair mindshare with sentiment. Ruma layers a sentiment and 15-emotion model on the same posts, and its crypto market sentiment and token sentiment tools let you check whether rising attention is constructive or a warning. If you want the conceptual difference spelled out, our guide on crypto mindshare vs. sentiment covers it.

Tracking top creators after Yaps

The other half of Yaps was the creator leaderboard — a ranked view of which accounts were driving crypto attention. If you tracked your own placement or watched top voices to see which accounts were moving conversation, you need a replacement influencer ranking.

Ruma's Top Influencers leaderboard ranks crypto voices by the attention they generate across sources, and it is a free public page. It overlaps with the most useful part of the Yaps creator board — seeing who is influential right now — without the post-to-earn incentive attached. For traders, the more actionable angle is not just who is loud, but who is early. Ruma treats smart money as a social signal: the top callers and accounts that tend to move attention before the wider market. To be precise about what that means, Ruma reads accounts and their calls, not on-chain wallets or fund flows. Our walkthrough on how to track smart-money crypto calls explains the workflow.

Alternatives at a glance

No single tool is a drop-in replacement for everything Yaps did, because Yaps bundled a rewards program, a creator board, and a project board into one free product. Here is how the common options map to the pieces you might miss.

A fair read on trade-offs matters here, so it is worth being blunt about each option, Ruma included.

• Ruma: free public mindshare and influencer pages, multi-source coverage (X, Reddit, YouTube, news), sentiment plus a 15-emotion model, per-token fear and greed across 100,000+ tokens, and a developer API. The honest cons: Ruma is a social- and news-intelligence layer, so it does not track on-chain wallets or fund flows, and it does not run a post-to-earn rewards program, so creators cannot “earn” the way Yaps let them. If a rewards loop was the point for you, that specific mechanic is not replicated. See Ruma as a Kaito alternative and the Kaito Pro alternative comparison for a direct feature map.
• Kaito Pro / Studio: the most direct continuation of Kaito's attention data, now inside paid products. Con: the free, glanceable board is gone, and access is workflow- and tier-dependent.
• Cookie.fun: strong on project attention and top voices with a familiar board feel. Con: coverage and free access vary; see our Cookie.fun alternative breakdown.
• LunarCrush: broad social discovery across many assets. Con: it is more of a general social-ranking tool than a crypto-native mindshare board; the LunarCrush alternative page compares the two.
• Santiment: useful when you want social metrics alongside on-chain data for research. Con: it is a metrics platform rather than a quick attention leaderboard, and the most useful views are paid.

What to do now

If Yaps was part of your routine, the practical migration is quick:

• For a fast mindshare read: bookmark Ruma's Mindshare Leaderboard in place of the Yaps project board, and pair it with sentiment so you are not fooled by controversy-driven attention.
• For creator and voice tracking: use the Top Influencers page, and if you trade off calls, layer in smart-money-as-social-signal to focus on accounts that tend to be early.
• For campaign or product-grade attention: Kaito's paid surfaces are the most direct continuation of Yaps' data, and Ruma's API is the route if you want to pull mindshare and sentiment into your own dashboards. Check current plans on the Ruma pricing page rather than assuming a tier.

Yaps was a genuinely interesting experiment in making attention legible, and it moved a lot of crypto behavior for a couple of years. Its retirement does not mean mindshare stopped mattering — only that the free scoreboard moved. The underlying job, reading share of conversation and who drives it, is still very much trackable. You can start with the free mindshare and influencer pages, and open the full app at app.ruma.fun when you want to go deeper.