When you can profit from "hype" itself.
Written by: Eric, Foresight News
On April 1, 2026, Beijing time, Noise, the "prediction market for hype", launched its Beta version and officially opened trading. Users need to pay $5 to trade on the Beta DApp to prevent malicious activities.
In January this year, Noise announced the completion of a $7.1 million seed round financing led by Paradigm, with participation from Figment Capital, Anagram, GSR, JPEG Trading, and KaitoAI – a representative of the attention economy whose API was previously cut off by X.
"Trading hype" has always meant deliberately creating topics and attracting attention through various means to increase the exposure and discussion of an event. However, Noise quantifies hype into a number, allowing users to trade the rise and fall of this number. In Noise's own words, prediction markets focus on "whether something will happen", while Noise focuses on "how important something is right now".
Hype Index Trading Platform
Noise's mechanism is actually easy to explain: it generates a hype index for an event or cultural symbol through its algorithm, allowing users to predict whether the hype will rise or fall in the future and take long or short positions.
There are only two things to note: first, how to trade; second, how this index is calculated.
Perhaps because it's in the testing phase, trading on the Noise platform does not directly use fiat currency or cryptocurrencies. Instead, users need to purchase "credits" on the platform and use them for trading.
Fiat purchases support bank channels as well as Cash App and Amazon Pay. For cryptocurrencies, transfers are made via MetaMask and Phantom, with support for USDC payments on Ethereum and Solana currently. The author did not find an entry to exchange credits back to fiat or stablecoins, possibly because the Beta version is only testing the trading engine and does not yet have settlement functionality.
Take the "crude oil" market, which has been a high focus recently, as an example: you can choose leverage from 1x to 5x for long/short trading. Currently, this market is one of the most popular in the Noise Beta version, but its 24-hour trading volume is only over 200,000 credits, with an open interest of about 2 million credits, which converts to less than $2,000.
Although not displayed on the front end, Noise also uses an order book model. Unlike prediction markets, Noise's trading market is more like a cryptocurrency perpetual contract: the index provided by the oracle is the "mark price", and the market automatically adjusts the balance between the market price and the mark price through funding rates.
As for the hype index we are trading, Noise calls it the "Relevance Index", and its calculation is based on two sources: content and signals.
For content, Noise tracks interaction counts, post numbers, and independent author counts for relevant topics on X, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and RSS news feeds. Signals come from trading volumes and market counts of related topics on Polymarket and Kalshi.
The smoothed values (to prevent short-term noise) of all sources and indicators are weighted and aggregated into a composite value, which is the index users trade. However, Noise has not fully disclosed the specific algorithm, most likely to prevent people from using the algorithm to artificially increase the hype of an event or weaken the hype of a hot event through a large amount of irrelevant information.
Interestingly, the author found a testnet experience video of Noise on YouTube from a year ago. In April 2025, Noise's index was still a "Mindshare" data between 0 and 100, and this term was still used in Forbes' report on prediction markets in February this year.
Founders Fresh Out of College
Noise's core founding team consists of three people, all from the University of Southern California: 22-year-old Luca Cordova Stuart, 26-year-old David Zhou, and 24-year-old Gabriel Perez Carafa.
Among them, Gabriel Perez Carafa had no work experience before Noise, Luca Cordova Stuart had an internship in BD at LayerZero Labs, and almost no public information can be found about David Zhou.
None of the three co-founders of Noise have any prominent backgrounds, which is quite similar to Kalshi when it first started. The difference is that although Forbes classifies Noise as a prediction market, these three young people disagree. In their blog post for the Beta launch, they wrote: "You may have seen people compare Noise to prediction markets. We understand why this comparison is made, but we do not agree with it. Speculation is just one of many factors. Our goal is to build a platform that helps people understand and spread deeper stories about modern culture, lifestyle, politics, and technological changes."
From multiple articles published in the past, Noise has always wanted to convey: eliminate noise and gain real insights. Prediction markets provide the probability of something happening based on real money, while Noise wants to discuss "whether it is necessary to talk about whether something will happen".
Beyond Speculation: What Are the Use Cases?
There is definitely speculation in trading markets, which is beyond debate. The key is what practical use cases Noise has beyond speculation.
Previously, Lara, a co-founder of Kalshi, shared at a conference that recently, the inflation prediction market on Kalshi has seen many orders worth tens of millions of dollars, which come from large enterprises using them to hedge against potential wage increases caused by inflation rebounds. Noise also provides a similar scenario: enterprises can use part of their marketing budget to short the topic they are preparing to market, thereby hedging against the failure of their marketing strategy.
In addition, "hype" has unique uses in trading cryptocurrencies, stocks, etc. According to the PUMP topic hype market on Noise, the highest hype coincided with the peak of PUMP's rebound after the first drop. For investors who believe in "buy when no one cares, sell when everyone is talking", Noise's related markets may be a good reference and hedging channel.
Noise plans to launch its mainnet on Base in the next few months, at which time the platform will be open to everyone and support real-money trading. From the author's perspective, Noise's idea is indeed quite innovative and has real use cases, but just like prediction markets a decade ago, trading "hype" and "trends" may still be a bit ahead of its time. However, at least in the recent market where stablecoins and payment apps are dominating the headlines, Noise is a target worth getting airdrops from.