Editor’s note: In this op-ed, AdLunam Co-founder Nadja Bester explores behavioral infrastructure, a missing layer of blockchain infrastructure—one built not on code, but on behavior. This piece is part of Altcoin Observer’s ongoing thought leadership series on the future of Web3.
We’ve spent the last decade obsessing over the mechanics. How fast we can go. How safe it all is. Whether the code agrees—or the regulators. But now that the machine works—we’re realizing it doesn’t understand us.
We needed to make the pipes work before anything meaningful could flow through them. But now that the infrastructure exists, a deeper, messier problem is surfacing—a missing behavioral infrastructure layer.
How do we coordinate humans in decentralized systems when we don’t actually understand the humans part?
Nadja Bester, AdLunam Co-founder
It’s one thing to align nodes. It’s another thing entirely to align people.
Wallets don’t talk. Transactions don’t tell you why someone clicked confirm. Discords and Telegram channels? Mostly half-dead mausoleums. Pinned memes, sporadic activity, and a whole lot of performance masked as community.
So we fall back on what’s easy to measure. Impressions. Likes. Wallet snapshots. Airdrop farming spreadsheets. Engagement stripped of meaning, designed to be gamed. And then we wonder why communities don’t stick. Why contributors vanish. Why day-one launch metrics look spectacular—until day ten rolls around and the numbers vanish like smoke.
I’ve lived that story too many times. We all have. Watching project after project drown in noise, unable to tell whether the crowd that showed up had any real intention of staying. For so many founders, it’s not their tech that’s broken, but their assumptions about human behavior.
We’ve been trying to build decentralized futures using systems that don’t understand the present-tense of human participation.
Nadja Bester, AdLunam Co-founder
At AdLunam, we’ve been obsessed with that problem: not how to gamify community, but how to infrastructuralize it. We’ve stopped trying to gamify engagement—though AdLunam Social is very much a gamified SocialFi platform—and started viewing it as behavioral infrastructure.
Not as a KPI, but as a foundational layer of system intelligence.
Not to generate more noise—but to distill signal.
And that starts with something deceptively simple, yet almost entirely missing in Web3 today:
Behavioral legibility. Because if consensus defined Web1, and ownership defined Web3, then what comes next will be defined by systems intelligence.
Behavior Isn’t a Metric. It’s a Signal.
We reward what we can measure. And what we measure right now is mostly speed and speculation. Speculative velocity.
Hype is visible. So we build for hype. We have marketing gimmicks. Vanity metrics. Airdrops, because “community.”But alignment? Loyalty? Curiosity? The subtle signals of someone actually here for the long haul?
Our systems are still blind to those.
So we keep building for churn.
Web3 optimizes for volatility—and call it virality.
Nadja Bester, AdLunam Co-founder
And then we wonder why the person who dumped your token three minutes after TGE walks away with a higher allocation tier than the one who’s been helping new users in your Telegram for six months.
That’s not just painful and destructive, but a fundamental design failure.
And it’s breaking the industry.
Behavior as Infrastructure: What We’re Building at AdLunam
Behavioral infrastructure isn’t just a fix—it’s a foundation. It shifts how we recognise value.
We need verification more than we do vibes (Web3’s never short of those). We need human participation made legible—so our systems can reward what actually matters.
At AdLunam, we’re building systems that:
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Track wallet-linked behavior across Web2 and Web3
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Identify users who self-select through consistency, not just noise
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Score behavior over time for coherence, not just clout
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Allocate access, visibility, and capital based on real engagement, not superficial hype
Proof of Attention: You Can’t Fake Showing Up
Enter Proof of Attention (PoA)—our behavioral reputation layer. We move beyond impressions or likes to focus on patterns. Presence. Participation over time.
PoA tracks cross-platform social actions and combines them with on-chain activity to create an evolving reputation score that signals trustworthiness, conviction, and follow-through. It looks at cross-platform activity—who’s sharing, commenting, contributing—and combines that with on-chain signals. Not just for bragging rights, but as the logic layer for access.
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If you’re farming airdrops with ten wallets but ghosting on the community side—PoA reflects that.
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If you’re still around when everyone else bailed, if you keep showing up when the market tanks—PoA captures that too.
The internet gave us programmable money. Proof of Attention lets us build programmable reputation.
Nadja Bester, AdLunam Co-founder
Forget Meritocracy. Think Asymmetry.
Consensus systems assume symmetrical inputs. Reality doesn’t. Human systems rarely work that way. Some users create. Some lurkers connect. Some observers absorb and amplify when it counts.
Behavioral infrastructure recognises that value creation is asymmetric. It honours diversity of contribution, not just intensity of visibility.
In practice, this can mean:
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Tying token allocations to behavioral context, not just wallet size
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Giving governance weight to people who actually show up, not just those who hold
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Rewarding consistent presence with compounding visibility—not one-off incentives gamed for points
Web3 Doesn’t Have a Social Layer. It Has Social Theater.
We talk a lot about community. But most of what we’re calling community is actually just a well-dressed audience. And audiences don’t coordinate. They consume. They watch.
The kind of coordination Web3 needs—especially as we inch toward mainstream adoption—can’t be built on stage performances. It requires real behavioral texture. The next infrastructure layer won’t be built just on tech. It’ll be built on people who can prove they’re invested—not just financially, but behaviorally.
We don’t need systems that scale noise. We need systems that surface signal. Not louder Web3 socials. Not more giveaways. But systems that surface the signal from the noise.
That’s what we’re building at AdLunam: Behavioral infrastructure—a social nervous system for Web3 and decentralized ecosystems. A layer that understands who’s really here—and why. That’s the next layer of infrastructure. Not just another chain, or faster L2, or better wallet UX. But an intelligence layer—built not to analyze people, but to understand them.
And that’s where we believe Web3 is heading—because it has to.
Conviction Can’t Be Bought
Let me be clear: PoA isn’t the final answer. But I’m done pretending that ignoring human behavior is a viable long-term strategy.
Speculation can be bought. But conviction? That has to be earned. Web3 won’t make it on tech alone. We need systems that don’t just scale code but scale trust, presence, and participation. Behavioral infrastructure isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s the only future-proof foundation we’ve got. And I’m building for that future.
Are you?
About the Author
Nadja Bester is the Co-founder of AdLunam Inc., a full-stack Web3 investment ecosystem building the behavioral infrastructure layer for decentralized systems. AdLunam’s proprietary Proof of Attention protocol tracks real engagement across Web2 and Web3, transforming participation into programmable reputation—and identity into capital.
This piece builds on the ideas from Nadja’s TEDx talk, Why your attention is valuable, where she explored how attention is the new currency—and how the systems we build must reflect that.
An award-winning entrepreneur and internationally recognized Web3 thought leader, Nadja works at the intersection of technology, psychology, and systems design—reimagining how people participate in the internet’s next evolution.
Follow her on X and LinkedIn, and sign up for her newsletter, Quantumnomics.