Author: David, Deep Tide TechFlow
On February 21, X's product lead Nikita Bier publicly demanded in a post that the poster add a disclaimer stating it was a paid promotion, otherwise the account would be suspended.
This post came from the account @infodexx, with content ranking the "Most Valuable Startups in 2025," placing the prediction market platform Kalshi second with an $11 billion valuation.
The post garnered over 420,000 views, but the poster's bio stated "Kalshi partner," and the post itself initially had no paid promotion label.
Subsequently, a user flagged it as commercial promotion content—essentially an ad—through X's Community Notes feature (a user-collaborative fact-checking mechanism where approved notes are displayed directly below the post).
Bier then announced that X would launch a set of paid promotion disclosure features the following week, requiring all posts with paid partnerships to be labeled, with violators facing account suspension.
The poster later added a context note to the original post, indicating it was a paid promotion.
Mandatory disclosure is just the latest step in this round of adjustments.
Over the past five months, X has successively cleaned up 1.7 million spam bot accounts, banned API access for InfoFi-type applications, launched anti-automation detection mechanisms, and restricted programmatic reply interfaces...
Although these actions occurred at different points in time, when pieced together, they form a clear timeline.
The wild marketing era on Crypto Twitter is perhaps being ended by the platform itself.
6 Major Cuts in 5 Months, Hitting the Artery of Crypto Marketing
X's changes to marketing rules have delivered six significant, overt blows over the past 5 months. We have compiled the key timeline and major events of these rule changes as follows:
First Cut: Spam Bots
In October 2025, Bier announced that X had removed 1.7 million reply spam bots in one week, the largest cleanup since Musk's acquisition. The primary targets were crypto-related automated accounts, familiar to anyone who has scrolled through crypto posts on X:
Scam links instantly replying under popular posts, fake accounts impersonating Elon Musk, and repetitive "gm" bots.
Removing 1.7 million was just the first step; the underlying issue was much larger.
Second Cut: InfoFi and the "Post-to-Earn" Model
The proliferation of these bots was largely due to InfoFi.
Third-party platforms tracked users' posts and interactions on X and rewarded them with tokens or points. The original intent was to incentivize valuable information production, but when posting itself could earn money, it evolved into quantity over quality. Bot farms and AI-generated批量 replies quickly dominated the leaderboards.
At its peak, the largest project, Kaito, had over 157,000 active users on its Yaps product. By January 9, 2026, CryptoQuant detected 7.75 million crypto-related posts on X in a single day, 12 times the normal level.
On January 15, 2026, Bier announced changes to the developer API policy, prohibiting all applications that "reward users for posting on X," immediately revoking relevant API access.
Kaito subsequently shut down Yaps, its token KAITO fell about 17% that day; Cookie DAO shut down a similar product, Snaps; the entire InfoFi sector lost approximately $40 million in market cap in one day.
(Reference reading: X Pulls the Rug, the Era of 'Farming with Your Mouth' Ends)
Third Cut: Accounts Simulating Human Operations
On February 13, Bier announced the launch of a new round of automation detection.
If no real person is clicking the screen, the account and all associated accounts may be banned. This cut is aimed not just at traditional bots, but at all accounts operated via scripts, automation tools, or AI agents.
Bier stated that X would support compliant agent use cases in the future, but recommended developers pause integrations until rules are clear, using the official API if necessary.
Fourth Cut: Stealth Ads
The first three cuts dealt with automation and spam. The fourth cut targeted a larger gray area: paid promotions without disclosure.
Anyone familiar with Crypto Twitter knows this has been an industry standard in the crypto space.
In September 2025, on-chain investigator ZachXBT publicly released a spreadsheet listing the promotion rates and receiving wallet addresses of over 200 crypto KOLs. About 160 had accepted promotions, but fewer than 5 had labeled their posts as "ad."
On January 22, app researcher Nima Owji discovered a Paid Promotion label feature under development in X's backend code. Creators would need to check if a post was a paid promotion when posting, and the label would be displayed directly on the post.
By February 21, when Bier personally intervened in the Kalshi post, this feature was ready for launch. He also announced a "Made with AI" label, requiring AI-generated content to be labeled.
Fifth Cut: Prediction Market Promotion
Following the disclosure feature announcement, X updated its paid partnership policy, explicitly categorizing prediction markets (like Kalshi and Polymarket) as gambling products, and comprehensively banning undisclosed related advertising.
Kalshi proactively removed its promotion partner badge on X on February 23, its spokesperson stating the enforcement was too difficult, as users easily misinterpreted accounts with the badge as being officially endorsed by Kalshi.
Sixth Cut: Programmatic Replies
The final cut landed on February 24. The X developer platform announced restrictions on automated replies sent via API.
Programmatic replies are only permitted if the original post @mentions or quotes the account. Product lead Bier called this the first step in clearing out bots, first plugging the biggest entry point.
After these six cuts—targeting bots, incentive mechanisms, automation tools, stealth ads, specific category promotions, and programmatic interfaces—X's control over crypto content has progressed layer by layer.
Combined, the entire marketing infrastructure that Crypto Twitter has relied on for operation over the past few years has been systematically dismantled.
X Rejects Free Riders, Welcomes Paying Customers
These rule changes combined are altering the cost structure of crypto marketing. In recent years, the main ways crypto projects acquired customers on X were through three free channels:
- InfoFi platforms incentivizing users to post for visibility,
- KOLs accepting stealth promotions without ad labels,
- Automation tools批量引流 under hot posts.
Now, all three channels are restricted or closed. Meanwhile, X's algorithm is widening the visibility gap between paid and free accounts.
Premium users receive a 2x to 4x weighting boost in the For You feed and reply排序. Some creators testing found that after March 2025, the median interaction for non-Premium accounts posting links had dropped to nearly zero.
The organic reach of crypto content萎缩 earlier. Crypto trader Lisa Edwards posted an analysis in December 2025 stating that after an algorithm update that month, the reach rate of posts containing symbols like BTC and ETH dropped by about 80%.
Simultaneously, as free channels are blocked, paid channels are opening.
X's policy on crypto ads has actually been loosening. According to X's official ad policy update log, since 2024, DeFi product ads have been approved, blockchain game ads opened in the US and Brazil, and the applicable markets for crypto exchange and wallet ads expanded from over a dozen original countries to include Denmark, Israel, Netherlands, Portugal, Ghana, Kenya, etc.
According to AWISEE statistics, X's crypto ad approval rate is about 60%, the highest among major platforms; Meta's is about 50%, and Google's is lower and explicitly bans DeFi ads.
On one side, free distribution is being systematically compressed; on the other, paid advertising categories and markets are continuously expanding. This is the monetization path all content platforms have taken:
First, cultivate a free content ecosystem to attract users and creators. Once network effects are established and creators become dependent on the platform, gradually tighten organic distribution, directing traffic to paid channels.
Facebook did the exact same thing to brand pages in 2014, with organic reach plummeting from double digits to single digits, forcing brands to shift from content operations to ad spending.
What X is doing to crypto content is essentially the same playbook.
Who Pays the Bill? Who Gets Eliminated?
With free channels cut, the bill will ultimately be分摊 across every role in the industry. This has at least three layers of impact on crypto marketing.
First, customer acquisition costs rise.
Before, a crypto project could rely on InfoFi points to incentivize tens of thousands of people to create buzz for it on X. Now that path is gone.
Formal KOL promotions will become more transparent with the disclosure feature, but posts labeled "ad" will have lower trust and engagement rates. Project teams will either increase budgets to compensate or accept reduced effectiveness.
Second, the KOL economy is repriced.
Data exposed by ZachXBT last year showed over 160 KOLs accepted promotions but almost none disclosed, with single post rates ranging from hundreds to $60,000. After mandatory disclosure, the room for operations that "look like organic content but are actually ads" is compressed. KOL pricing logic will shift from "I can help you伪装成 organic content" to "How much conversion can my labeled ad still drive?".
The former is priced on information asymmetry, the latter on performance.
For the industry, this might not be a bad thing, but短期内 a batch of KOLs and agencies surviving in the gray area will be eliminated.
Third, platform dependency risk is repriced.
Bier's exact words when banning InfoFi were,建议被封的开发者 "go to Threads and Bluesky to pivot."
A platform's product lead openly advising developers to go to competitors indicates X doesn't mind crypto projects分流, and might even be actively pushing them. After this round of changes, for project teams and KOLs, putting all social assets on X alone is no longer conservative, but risky.
For ordinary users, this isn't all bad news.
Before, scrolling through Crypto Twitter, six out of ten posts might have been paid for, but none would tell you. After the disclosure feature launches, users can at least distinguish between promotions and genuine opinions. The information environment becomes cleaner, and the cost of judgment decreases.
Of course, the timing of the rule tightening also coincides with a bear market.
Bear markets themselves compress marketing budgets; fewer projects are willing to spend on promotion, so the information flow naturally quiets down. Whether the clean environment is due to the rules or the冷清 will only be truly tested when the bull market returns.
Regardless, whether for project teams, KOLs, or ordinary creators, the price of admission to be seen on Crypto Twitter is now rising.
The logic of this business was "whoever is loudest wins"; in the future, it will become "whoever is willing to pay gets a voice."
