Attacking crypto companies due to financial difficulties? Can X hegemony resist?

Original | Odaily Planeta Diario ( @OdailyChina )

Autor: Golem ( @web3_golem )

Since June, cripto projects have seen a wave of X account bans, with some official accounts and accounts of related personnel being frozen without warning, including ElizaOS official account and its founder Shaws personal account, GMGN official account and its founder hazes personal account, pumpfun official account and its founder Alon Cohens personal account. At first, the community had various speculations about the motives for Xs ban, including project absconding, regulatory pressure, and Pop Mart meme pictures.

Bubble Matt

But among many speculations, the more reliable reason is related to the illegal use of third-party crawlers by crypto projects . Crypto KOL AB Kuai.Dong published an article , and the more credible explanation is that this wave of account blocking is aimed at data crawling that does not pass the official API interface. He pointed out that if a company retrieves 200 million tweets per month through the official interface of X, it will cost more than 200,000 US dollars. Many projects such as gmgn, ai16z, and eliza use third-party crawlers to obtain data in order to save costs, resulting in centralized bans.

However, on June 18, Shaw, the founder of ElizaOS, posted a post on the Farcaster platform accusing X officials of blackmailing him by unblocking his account. He said that X officials cited his open source code and claimed that they violated certain terms of service, including selling data and selling certain content by bypassing API keys. He also said that if Shaw was willing to pay $50,000 per month for an enterprise license, they would stop making things difficult for him. However, Shaw has already paid $1,000 per month for yellow label certification and $200 for a developer license. Therefore, Shaw believes that this is unreasonable and said that he is considering whether to use legal means.

Shaw rants about Musk on Farcaster

After Shaws revelation, the community speculated that the accounts of pumpfun and GMGN were unblocked or that they compromised on the unblocking conditions of X officials. At the same time, after the unblocking, GMGN suspended X monitoring and crawler tools, and Pumpfun deleted the sniping/tracking function.

In order to get closer to the truth, Odaily Planet Daily asked GMGN officials to verify the reasons for its blocking and unblocking, but GMGN refused to make a public response to the matter, saying I cant say.

Is it that the crypto project is deliberately escaping or is X just being too greedy?

Since Musk officially became the owner of Twitter (now renamed X) in October 2022, X cancelled the free API in 2023 and fully implemented a high-priced payment strategy. Since then, many companies have had disputes with X officials over issues such as hidden API charging terms and forced upgrades to the enterprise version. Its just that this time crypto companies were collectively targeted.

In October 2024, Ervin Kalemi, founder of the social media management platform Publer , publicly protested against Xs hidden charges on the X platform. He said that Publer had originally subscribed to Xs enterprise-level API ($42,000/month), but from November 1, 2024, X officials told him that in addition to the original monthly fee, he would be charged an additional US$1/month per connected account, which means that Publer will pay tens of thousands of dollars more every month.

In early 2025, a user reveló that X officially began to crack down on companies that used user-provided API keys (BYOK) to bulk pull X data for customers. Commercial-grade data integration/ETL service providers such as Fivetran, Airbyte, and Stitch were all within the scope of the crackdown, requiring them to upgrade to the most expensive enterprise version of the API. It was also reported that some companies had received a lawyers letter from Xs legal department.

According to the official pricing information released by X, upgrading an X account to Enterprise Gold Standard costs $200 per month for the basic version and $1,000 per month for the full version.

Regarding API pricing, X also officially divides it into three levels. The basic version is $200 per month, the professional version is $5,000 per month, and for enterprises and large-scale projects, you need to apply for customization.

X Platform API Fee Standard

From the above charging standards alone, it can be seen that the X platform may indeed have hidden charges and extortion companies. Because the existing charging standards do not specify what size and nature of enterprises need to apply for customization, and the price standards for customized enterprise versions are not open and transparent, are the API charges for different companies just based on the monopoly of X? For enterprises, X officials control the life and death of platform accounts and can block platform accounts at will. If the enterprise does not agree to the charging plan or delays the negotiation time, the interests of the enterprise will be harmed in the end. In this case, most enterprises will choose to pay the money obediently.

Financial pressure behind X platform

Wielding the right to ban accounts to threaten companies to pay fees may be Musks shady trick to save the X platform. Before Musk completely privatized Twitter, Twitters financial situation was in a loss-making state every year. Since its listing in 2013, Twitter has only made profits in 2018 and 2019, and has been in a loss-making state in the rest of the fiscal years. In 2021, the last fiscal year when Twitter was privatized by Musk, the loss still reached 221 million US dollars.

Twitters profit and loss from 2010 to 2021, source: Wikipedia

The long-term losses also led Musk to implement the X platform API charging model in March 2023. In 2023, according to public data , the paid API contributed about $900 million in revenue to the X platform, accounting for 26% of the total revenue; advertising revenue is still the main source of Xs revenue, about $2.5 billion, accounting for 75%; the rest of the revenue comes from XPremium subscriptions and corporate gold label certification. Although API charging was launched in 2023, according to Reuters , Twitters cash flow was still negative in 2023 due to a 50% drop in advertising revenue and heavy debt burden.

Since Musk privatized Twitter in 2022, it has not disclosed its financial data to the public, but we can still infer from third-party information that its financial situation in 2024 is not optimistic. In February 2025, Musk dicho in an email to employees, Our user growth has stagnated, revenue is not satisfactory, and we are barely maintaining a balance between income and expenditure. The bulk of its expenditure comes from the high debt costs accumulated by Musk when he acquired Twitter. At the end of 2024, the annual interest expense X alone paid more than $1.3 billion .

Therefore, under tremendous financial pressure, in order to generate revenue, X officials chose to reach into the pockets of companies that rely on platform APIs.

X platform hegemony has strangled the throat of encryption communication

However, facing financial pressure itself is not a reason for X to wield the freezing stick and exercise hegemony over enterprises.

X has users all over the world, and its information covers entertainment, politics, business and other aspects. It is a very important channel for brand promotion and market updates for enterprises, especially for crypto enterprises. De acuerdo a a survey by Coingecko , 41.7% of crypto users use X as their main social media platform, followed by Telegram and YouTube. At the same time, 73.8% of crypto users choose to obtain crypto news through social media platforms.

Because X has accumulated a large number of crypto users and crypto social data, it has become the cornerstone of the crypto industry, just like public chains such as Ethereum. Therefore, about 90% of crypto companies and KOLs will choose to publish brand promotion and product update information on the X platform, and many Web3 task platforms will also choose X as the main community interaction platform. If crypto is banned, it is equivalent to cutting off the channels for crypto companies and KOLs to promote themselves externally.

On the other hand, the Meme, AI Agent and InfoFi tracks that emerged in the crypto industry in 2024 are all highly dependent on the X platform. The vast majority of Meme Golden Dogs are not only born in X, but also spread and fermented in X, which is also the main reason why dog-beating tools choose to monitor X; most AI Agents social training data comes from X, and Agents choose to be active on the X platform, such as AIXBT, Eliza, etc.; InfoFi platform is even more highly dependent on X, and the mouth-pushing and KOL ranking data are all from the X platform. If X does not allow the InfoFi platform to use the official API, this track may not exist, so Kaito is willing to pay $2 million to the X platform every month to survive .

Such deep dependence makes X not only a bridge, but also a shackle of power that firmly controls the pulse of the crypto world.

The crypto industry, which advocates the ideal of decentralization, is highly dependent on a centralized platform, which is like a freedom fighter voluntarily putting on shackles. At this time, people will think of those decentralized social utopias that were once highly anticipated, such as Farcaster and Lens. Although they understand the needs of encryption and financialization, they unfortunately do not understand social interaction and products, and it is difficult to light up the main channel of crypto social interaction.

This morning, I found that Shaw, the founder of ElizaOS, had deleted the post accusing X on the Farcaster platform. Does this mean that Shaw is inclined to admit defeat to X? If the encryption industry continues to hand over information sovereignty to X, then its hegemony may be sanctioned at any time. When encryption companies become targets again, they can only swallow their anger – nothing to say.

This article is sourced from the internet: Attacking crypto companies due to financial difficulties? Can X hegemony resist?

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