Attention is a valid proxy for economic activity when choosing signals with predictive power — strong variable sensitivity, in machine learning terms. As a matter of fact, besides the “on-chain” economy that usually makes the headlines, there is an “off-chain” crypto economy where economic formation happens when groups explicitly commit resources. For instance, there are thousands of professional traders that pay hundreds of dollars each quarter for access to private chats where they discuss calls on entry/exit points. Attention pricing \cite{venegas2018} in those trading signals services can be quantified using a similar network-view approach, and it has a direct impact on the larger “on-chain” transactional economy. And there are multiple examples of such micro-economies.

Crypto Economy Complexity

While economic complexity is measured by the mix of products that countries are able to make, crypto economy complexity depends on the remixing of activities. In this sense, specialization is a kind of division of labor — do investors become simultaneously experts in ICO valuation, crypto hedge fund operations, cryptocurrency contracts for difference betting, smart contract programming, and so on, or do they seek for social validation from the experts on each of these fields before making a decision? If we inspect the network of bitcoin forks we find that competitive coins not only are supported by hashing capacity and other characteristics that can be considered as economic fundamentals, but they rely on attention flows from a diverse pool of difficult-to-transfer knowledge. One should know those who know.