Forum Is Building a Stock Exchange for Cultural Attention and I Am Fascinated

The Macro: Attention Drives Everything But Nobody Can Trade It

Here is something I have been thinking about. Attention is the most valuable resource in the digital economy. It determines which companies succeed, which artists break through, which products sell. Entire industries exist to capture and redirect attention. Advertising. Social media. Streaming. PR. All of it orbits around the same thing: who is paying attention to what, and when.

But you cannot trade attention directly. You can buy stock in a company that benefits from attention. You can bet on advertising platforms. But there is no financial instrument that lets you express a view on attention itself. If you believe a cultural trend is about to explode or collapse, your only option is to find proxy bets through traditional equities or sit on the sidelines.

Forum, backed by Y Combinator, wants to change that by building the first regulated exchange where you can trade on cultural attention. They create indices from search data, social media activity, and streaming numbers. These indices measure what people care about. And traders can go long or short on changes in those indices.

The concept is wild. And I mean that as a compliment. This is genuinely new territory.

The Micro: Indices Built on Search, Social, and Streaming

The mechanics are straightforward in theory, complex in execution. Forum aggregates data from search engines, social platforms, and streaming services to build attention indices. These indices quantify how much the world cares about a given topic, brand, person, or cultural moment at any point in time.

Traders then use Forum’s exchange to take positions on whether attention will increase or decrease. If you think a musician is about to blow up, you go long on their attention index. If you think a brand is about to face a backlash, you go short. The exchange settles based on the actual data.

The founding team has the right mix for this. Owen Botkin traded long/short equities at Balyasny, so he understands market structure and trading infrastructure. Joseph Thomas was a software engineer at NASA, so the technical chops are there to build the data pipelines and exchange infrastructure.

The regulatory angle is critical. Forum describes itself as the first “regulated” exchange for attention trading. Getting regulatory approval for a new asset class is enormously difficult. Prediction markets like Kalshi have spent years navigating CFTC approvals. Polymarket operates in a legal gray area. Forum will face similar scrutiny, and the outcome of those regulatory conversations will determine whether this is a real exchange or a novelty.

The competition is interesting. Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket let you bet on events, but not on continuous attention metrics. Social tokens and creator coins tried something adjacent but mostly failed due to speculation without real utility. Forum’s index-based approach is more rigorous than social tokens because it is grounded in measurable data rather than hype.

The biggest question is liquidity. A new exchange needs traders, and traders need liquidity. Without enough participants, spreads are wide, prices are unreliable, and the exchange feels dead. Building liquidity from zero is one of the hardest problems in finance.

The Verdict

Forum is one of the most conceptually ambitious companies I have seen in a while. Trading on attention as an asset class is a genuinely novel idea, and if they can execute on the regulatory and liquidity challenges, they will have created something that did not exist before.

At 30 days: have they secured any regulatory approvals or exemptions? Without regulatory clarity, the exchange cannot operate at scale. This is the gating factor for everything else.

At 60 days: what does the attention index methodology look like in practice? Are the indices stable and predictable enough to trade on, or are they noisy and gameable? The data integrity behind the indices will make or break trader confidence.

At 90 days: what is daily trading volume? Even modest volume would be a strong signal. This is a brand-new asset class, so expectations should be calibrated accordingly. But if traders are showing up and placing real money, the concept is validated.

I am genuinely excited about this one. Most fintech startups are building incrementally better versions of existing products. Forum is proposing an entirely new market. That kind of ambition carries enormous risk, but the upside is proportional.