Gamers who enjoy casual gaming are devastated! Twitter bans InfoFi, forcing its ecosystem projects to drastically cut their losses.

Author: Nancy, PANews

Late on January 15, a silent "earthquake" struck the encrypted Twitter community (CT).

With X (formerly Twitter) announcing the removal of API access to the InfoFi application, the "tweet mining" game came to a halt, prompting project teams to choose to transform their strategies, leaving casual gamers feeling "the sky has fallen."

Revoking API access permissions and refusing to collect millions in "tolls"

The InfoFi sector has undergone a dramatic transformation overnight.

Nikita Bier, X Product Manager and Solana Ecosystem Advisor, officially announced last night that the platform is revising its developer API policy, which will no longer allow applications that reward users for posting, and specifically named InfoFi.

Nikita stated bluntly that such incentive mechanisms are the main culprit behind the platform's proliferation of AI spam and invalid replies. X has now revoked these apps' API access, and the user experience should begin to improve soon once the bots realize they are no longer being paid.

For developers whose accounts were terminated, Nikita also "thoughtfully" suggested that the team could help them transition their business to Meta's Threads and decentralized social media Bluesky, a statement that was quite sarcastic.

More importantly, even though applications like InfoFi, which frequently call APIs, contribute a significant amount of "tolls," X resolutely chose to forgo them. "InfoFi applications are already paying us millions of dollars for enterprise-level API access. We don't want that money," Nikita's statement indicates that user experience is X's current strategic priority, especially since these benefits are negligible compared to X's overall annual revenue.

This also officially marks the end of the InfoFi model that parasitizes the X ecosystem, and the era of simple and crude verbal manipulation is over.

In fact, this is not the first time Nikita has "declared war" on low-quality content.

Just recently, he criticized crypto Twitter for its suicidal decline. Nikita stated at the time that since October of last year, a rumor had been circulating in CryptoKitties that users needed to reply hundreds of times a day to achieve account growth. However, each post consumed some of the user's influence for the day. Since ordinary users only view 20 to 30 posts per day, the platform couldn't show all of a user's posts to all their followers. Therefore, crypto Twitter users ultimately wasted all their influence on hundreds of "gm" replies, receiving only a small number of views when they posted substantive content such as project announcements. The decline of crypto Twitter stemmed from its own behavior, not algorithmic issues.

At the time, this tweet sparked strong dissatisfaction within the crypto community, even triggering a large-scale GM backlash, ultimately leading to its deletion. However, in retrospect, X's determination to crack down on low-quality content was already foreshadowed.

Ecological project cuts losses to survive, team accused of premature shipments.

The InfoFi narrative is facing a downturn as X tightens its API policies.

According to CoinGecko data, the market capitalization of the InfoFi sector fell to $350 million in the past 24 hours, with many tokens experiencing double-digit declines. Even Kaito's Yapybaras NFT floor price was not spared, plummeting.

Faced with the challenge of survival, many InfoFi applications have announced their transformation.

Yu Hu, founder of the representative project Kaito, stated that the company will gradually discontinue Yaps and its incentive-based leaderboard system, and instead launch the new Kaito Studio. This decision stems from the platform's problems with low-quality content and spam, as well as the crypto industry's shift from high-frequency global distribution to more precise marketing. After discussions with the X platform, both parties reached a consensus: a completely permissionless distribution system is no longer feasible and does not meet the needs of high-quality brands, serious content creators, and the X platform itself. Over the past few months, the platform has been developing Kaito Studio, a product that will adopt a tiered traditional marketing model, connecting brands with high-quality creators through top-tier analytics tools, covering multiple platforms including X, YouTube, and TikTok, and expanding beyond cryptocurrency to fields such as finance and AI.

Meanwhile, after consulting with the X team, Cookie DAO has decided to immediately shut down the Snaps platform and all creator activities. Cookie DAO stated that it will await confirmation and guidance from the X platform to determine whether Snaps-like creator activities can operate in any form in the future. Simultaneously, the platform is communicating directly with all projects currently running Snaps activities. Some situations are more complex, involving paid activity fees and promised rewards. While a complete solution is not yet available, the platform will adhere to the principle of fairness and communicate directly with each project. The platform has archived snapshots of all active activities and will provide updates to creators as soon as possible. All other Cookie products are unaffected. Furthermore, the platform has been continuously developing the encrypted real-time market intelligence tool, Cookie Pro, over the past six months, and plans to launch it in the first quarter.

Judging from the project team's statements, this policy adjustment was not a sudden black swan event; the team was aware of the changing winds and had planned its transformation in advance. This has sparked controversy in the market, with the community questioning whether the project knew about the negative news beforehand and sold off its holdings.

Taking Kaito as an example, its multi-signature contract address distributed and transferred a total of 24 million KAITO tokens (approximately $13.31 million) to five addresses two weeks ago. Among these, according to crypto KOL "vasucrypto," an address starting with 0x049A, associated with the Kaito team, transferred 5 million KAITO tokens to Binance seven days ago, possibly for sale. More intriguingly, crypto KOL "CryptoFearless" added that the unlocking of Kaito staking has also peaked in recent days. 1.1 million KAITO tokens will be unlocked tomorrow (January 17th), with an unstaking period of seven days.

Saying goodbye to the era of "talking nonsense," content justice is finally arriving.

This brutal industry cleanup is not only an adjustment to platform rules, but also a reshaping of the encrypted content ecosystem.

For X, which heavily relies on advertising revenue and subscription services, this adjustment is a necessary choice for survival in the face of slowing user growth, inefficient traffic monetization, and the strong rise of competitors. In fact, over the past few months, X has already begun sweeping reforms in content and traffic distribution, including adjusting algorithm weights and increasing revenue for high-quality creators. Ultimately, X's real target is not simply the InfoFi model, but rather the low-quality content that severely dilutes the platform's value and drives away genuine users.

For the crypto Twitter community, this is a belated call for content justice. While the InfoFi model was initially intended to incentivize creators to produce high-quality content through token rewards, and it did indeed enjoy a brief period of success, this mechanism has been distorted by "perk-grabbing" behavior. A large number of profit-seekers have been frantically creating low-quality and repetitive spam in pursuit of rewards. This false boom in traffic not only leads to bland content but also drowns out truly in-depth and valuable content, accelerating the loss of genuine users.

This "ban" is undoubtedly a "noise filter" for CT users who have had enough of spam, and Timeline can finally breathe a sigh of relief.

However, the decline in CT's popularity cannot be entirely attributed to InfoFi; it is also closely related to the overall downturn in the crypto industry. Even views of crypto content on YouTube have fallen to their lowest level since January 2021.

Regardless, the end of the InfoFi model is an inevitable step towards improving the readability of encrypted content and returning to the essence of content. For InfoFi projects, with the shortcut of relying on the traffic of Web2 giants cut off, how to establish a SocialFi mechanism based on the flow of real value is a pressing problem that needs to be solved.