Hit the crypto company due to financial difficulties? Can “X hegemony” resist?

Author: Golem, Odaily Planet Daily

Since June, crypto projects have ushered in a wave of X-account bans. Some official accounts and related personnel of the project have been frozen in batches without warning, including the official account of ElizaOS and its founder Shaw, the official account of GMGN and its founder haze, and the official account of pumpfun and its founder Alon Cohen. At first, the community had various speculations about X's motive for banning the account, including project runaway, regulatory pressure and "Pop Matt" memes.

Pop Matt

But the reason why it is more reliable among many speculations is related to the illegal use of third-party crawlers for encryption projects. Encryption KOL AB Kuai.Dong published a post, and the credible explanation is that this account ban is targeting data crawling that has not been passed through the official API interface. He pointed out that if companies search 200 million tweets per month through the X official interface, they will pay more than US$200,000. Many projects such as gmgn, ai16z, and eliza may use third-party crawlers to obtain data, resulting in centralized bans.

However, on June 18, ElizaOS founder Shaw posted a lawsuit on the Farcaster platform that accused X of extorting it on the grounds of unblocking his account. He said that X officially quoted 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 said that Shaw would stop making things difficult if he was willing to pay $50,000 a month to purchase the enterprise version license, but Shaw has paid $1,000 a month for the "yellow label" certification and $200 a month for the developer license. Therefore, Shaw believes this is unreasonable and says he is considering whether to use legal means.

Shaw scolds Musk on Farcaster platform

After Shaw's revelations, the community speculated that pumpfun and GMGN's accounts were unblocked or compromised on X's official "unblocking conditions". At the same time, after the unblocking, GMGN suspended X's monitoring and crawler tools, and Pumpfun deleted the sniper/tracking function.

In order to get closer to the truth, Odaily Planet Daily asked GMGN to verify the reasons for its ban and unblocking, but GMGN refused to make a public response to the matter, and the original words were "can't say it."

Is it a crypto project that deliberately escaped or is it an ugly

appearance?

Since Musk officially became the owner of Twitter (now renamed X) in October 2022, X has canceled the free API and fully implemented a high-priced payment strategy in 2023. Since then, many companies have had disputes with X official over issues such as hiding charging terms of APIs and mandatory upgrade of the enterprise version. But this time, crypto companies were targeted collectively.

In October 2024, Ervin Kalemi, founder of the social media management platform Publer, publicly protested on X platform for the official hidden charges. He said that Publer originally subscribed to X enterprise-level API (US$42,000/month), but starting from November 1, 2024, X official told him that in addition to the original monthly fee, it would also be charged separately at "US$1 per access account per month", which means that Publer will pay another tens of thousands of dollars per month.

At the beginning of 2025, some users revealed that X official began to crack down on companies that use the user's own API Key (BYOK) to pull X data in batches for customers. Commercial-grade data integration/ETL service providers such as Fivetran, Airbyte, and Stitch are all within the scope of the crackdown, and the requirement is that they must upgrade to the most expensive enterprise version of the API, and said that some companies have received lawyer letters from X Legal Affairs.

According to the price information officially released by X, the X account is upgraded to the corporate gold standard, the basic version is $200 per month, while the full version costs $1,000 per month.

Regarding the pricing of APIs, X official also mainly divides them into 3 levels. The basic version is $200 per month, and the professional version is $5,000 per month, while for corporate and large-scale projects, you need to apply for customization.

X Platform API Charging Standard

From the above charging standards alone, we can see that the X platform may indeed have hidden charges and "extortion" companies. Because the existing charging standards do not specify in detail what scale and nature of enterprises need to apply for customization, and the price standards for customized enterprise versions are not open and transparent, is the API charges for different companies only rely on X, which has a monopoly position? For enterprises, X official controls the life and death rights of the platform account and can ban the platform account at will. If the enterprise does not agree to the charging plan or delays the negotiation time, the ultimate harm will be the interests of the enterprise. In this case, most enterprises will choose to "pay the money well."

X The financial pressure behind the platform

Such wielding account ban rights to threaten corporate payments may be Musk's "secret trick" to save the X platform. Before Musk completely privatized Twitter, Twitter's financial situation was in a loss-making state year after year. Since its listing in 2013, Twitter has only achieved profits in 2018 and 2019, and the rest of the fiscal years were in a loss-making state. In the last fiscal year when Twitter was privatized by Musk, the loss was still $221 million.

Twitter 's profit and loss situation from 2010 to 2021, source: Wikipedia

Years of losses also led Musk to implement the X platform API charging model in March 2023. In 2023, according to public data, paid API contributed about $900 million to the X platform, accounting for 26% of the total revenue; advertising revenue is still the main source of X's revenue, accounting for 75% of the total revenue; the remaining revenue comes from XPremium subscriptions and enterprise gold standard certification. Although API charges were launched in 2023, according to Reuters, Twitter's cash flow was still negative in 2023 due to a 50% plunge in advertising revenue and a heavy debt burden.

Since Musk privatized Twitter in 2022, he has not disclosed financial data to the public, but we can still speculate from third-party information that his financial situation in 2024 is not optimistic. In a February 2025 Musk said in an email to employees, "Our user growth has stagnated and revenue is not satisfactory. We are almost barely maintaining a balance of revenue 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 officially chose to put his hands into the pocket of the enterprise that relies on the platform API.

X platform hegemony, pinching the throat of encrypted propagation

But facing financial pressure is not the reason why X can hold up the freezing stick and exercise hegemony to enterprises.

X's users are all over the world, and its information covers many aspects such as entertainment, politics, and business. It is a very important channel for enterprises to promote and market updates, especially for crypto enterprises. According to a CoinGecko survey, 41.7% of crypto users use X as the main social media platform, followed by Telegram and YouTube, while 73.8% of crypto users choose to obtain encrypted news through social media platforms.

Because X has accumulated a large number of encrypted users and encrypted social data, it has become the cornerstone of the encryption 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 to use X as the main community interaction platform. If encryption is banned, it is equivalent to cutting off the channels for crypto companies and KOLs to promote externally.

On the other hand, Meme, AI Agent and InfoFi tracks that emerged in the crypto industry in 2024 are highly dependent on the X platform. Most Meme Golden Dogs are not only born in X, but also spread and fermentation in X, which is also the main reason why dog-beating tools choose to monitor X; most of the social training data of AI Agents come from X, and Agents choose to be active on X platform, such as AIXBT, Eliza, etc.; InfoFi platforms are highly dependent on X, and the ranking data of "mouth rude" and KOL lists are both derived from 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 X platform every month to maintain survival.

Such deep dependence makes X not only a bridge, but also a shackle turned into power, firmly clamping the pulse of the encrypted world.

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

This morning, I found that ElizaOS founder Shaw has deleted the post that accused X on the Farcaster platform. Does this mean that Shaw has tended to "confess" to X? If the crypto industry continues to hand over information sovereignty to X, its hegemony may be subject to sanctions at any time. When crypto companies become targets again, they can only break their teeth and swallow them in their stomachs - "can't say it."