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Elon Musk’s X is taking action against projects that seek to financialize users’ attention on the platform using digital assets, Head of Product Nikita Bier declared on Thursday.
“We will no longer allow apps that reward users for posting on X,” he said. “This has led to a tremendous amount of AI slop [and] reply spam on the platform.”
As part of the initiative, Bier said that X had revoked API access for so-called InfoFi projects, arguing that users’ experience on the platform “should start improving soon” as bots become aware that their activity is no longer generating income.
Bier’s statement included a call to people that had their developer accounts terminated, offering assistance with transitioning them to Meta’s Threads or Bluesky, the decentralized alternative to X that gained traction after Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in 2022.
Kaito, a project that’s become synonymous with InfoFi following its debut last February, saw its native token nosedive following the announcement. Changing hands around $0.58, the token’s price dropped over 15% within 30 minutes of Bier’s statement, according to CoinGecko.
Other InfoFi tokens tracked by CoinGecko fell as well, including Cookie DAO and Loud. The digital assets respectively fell 11% each over the same period of time.
The decision at X follows controversy generated over users’ use of “gm,” pandemic-era crypto slang for “good morning,” which many consistently used as a way to engage communities.
In a since-deleted post on X, Bier recently argued that Crypto Twitter was “dying from suicide, not from the algorithm,” after industry members complained of limited reach. He pointed to users’ repetitive use of the term “gm” as one source of low-quality content.
Since then, Bier has engaged with numerous crypto-related accounts, and on Tuesday, he signaled that the X algorithm’s treatment of associated “gm” posts had been “fixed.”
The transition comes as X has pushed forward with other crypto-related initiatives. Earlier this week, the company introduced “Smart Cashtags” that allow users to specify which asset they are specifically referencing in a post down to individual smart contracts.
Separately, Kaito said on Thursday that it was sunsetting Yaps, a feature that allowed users to earn an AI-generated, tokenized score for their engagement with various topics. Kaito founder Yui Hu described Yaps on X as something that “embodied the core Web3 ethos.”
Hu noted that Kaito was used for marketing and building awareness, with traction among people in South Korea. Hu said that Kaito held “discussions with X,” which determined that Yap wasn’t aligned with “the needs of high-quality brands, serious content creators, or X as a platform.”
Critics argued that Yaps created a pay-for-play environment on X, where users were incentivized to generate hype and repetitive commentary, rather than engage in an actual dialogue, through a process widely criticized as “attention farming.”
Pseudonymous crypto sleuth ZachXBT, who accused Kaito of having inflated user metrics in August, described X’s decision to rid the platform of InfoFi projects as “based.”
“The inorganic activity and fake metrics [were] obvious to anyone with common sense, and it made X borderline unusable for everyone else,” the sleuth added.
At the same time, some onlookers raised the prospect that InfoFi platforms could continue to use X, if they were willing to pony up cash. Bier indicated that wasn’t an option.
“They were already paying us millions for Enterprise API access,” he said. “We don’t want it.”
Editor's note: This story was updated after publication with additional detail.
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