Kaito expands into new verticals after successful airdrop, launching Studio marketplace for brands

Kaito built its name by helping Crypto Twitter creators quantify something that was previously vibes-only: influence. Now, after a token airdrop that pushed its fully diluted valuation near $2 billion and a forced reckoning with platform policy changes, the company is betting it can do the same thing far beyond crypto.

The pivot centers on Kaito Studio, a tier-based creator-brand marketplace that launched in beta in February 2026 with 16 initial brand partners. It represents a fundamental shift in how Kaito operates and, more importantly, who it serves.

From Yaps to Studio: why Kaito had to change

The platform, founded in 2022 by Yu Hu, originally tackled a real problem: crypto information is scattered across dozens of platforms, communities, and group chats. Kaito used AI to aggregate and analyze all of it, turning noise into signal.

Its breakout feature was the Yaps program, which rewarded active content creators with points for their contributions to Crypto Twitter discourse.

That redemption came in February 2025, when Kaito executed its $KAITO token airdrop. The company allocated 10% of its 1 billion total token supply, and the results were hard to ignore. The token’s FDV hit approximately $1.9 to $2 billion shortly after launch, with listings on both Binance and Coinbase giving it immediate liquidity and visibility.

By mid-2025, Kaito had distributed over $74 million in cumulative airdrops.

Then X changed the rules. On January 15, 2026, the Yaps program was terminated after X revoked API access that had enabled the incentivized posting model.

What Kaito Studio actually does

Kaito Studio functions as a curated marketplace where brands can run campaigns with vetted creators. The model shifts from “post and maybe get rewarded” to “here’s a structured engagement with measurable outcomes.”

The 16 brand partners at launch signal that Kaito isn’t starting from zero. The company’s AI-driven analytics capabilities, originally built for parsing crypto discourse, are being repurposed to measure creator performance across campaigns in multiple verticals.

Kaito isn’t just expanding within crypto. The company is targeting finance, AI, entertainment, sports, and geopolitics as new sectors for its marketplace. It also plans to extend its reach beyond X to platforms like YouTube and TikTok.

The company has raised over $10.8 million from investors including Dragonfly Capital and Sequoia Capital China.

What this means for investors and the attention economy

For $KAITO token holders, the expansion matters because it directly affects utility and demand. If Kaito Studio gains traction with brands across multiple verticals, there’s a plausible path to the token capturing value from a much larger addressable market than Crypto Twitter alone. The $74 million in cumulative airdrops also suggests the team is willing to use tokenomics aggressively to maintain creator engagement during the transition.

The risk is execution. Pivoting from a community rewards program to a structured B2B marketplace is not a small shift. It changes the customer from the creator to the brand, and those are very different sales cycles with very different expectations.

There’s also the platform dependency question. Kaito got burned once by relying too heavily on X. Expanding to YouTube and TikTok diversifies that risk, but it also means building integrations and relationships with platforms that have their own histories of sudden policy changes.