In the span of a week, what does Twitter's continuous updating on the Coin Circle Plate reform and Musk's intentions mean?

The X Platform has once again undergone a major overhaul in the cryptocurrency section.

For ordinary users, this may just mean noticing fewer inexplicable replies on the timeline or sudden price drops for certain tokens; but for the "InfoFi" projects that rely on this platform for their livelihood, it was nothing short of a disaster. Without any warning, the X Platform cut off the API access for multiple well-known Web3 information flow projects, including Kaito and Cookie. Despite these projects paying X millions of dollars in annual API call fees and being seen as some of the most active innovators in the Twitter ecosystem.

When connecting the dots, considering the X Platform's recent move to add smart tags to cryptocurrency and stock tickers a few days ago, think about what Musk is trying to do.

Perhaps he is weeding out the garden, as he prepares to lay down the golden path to the Everything App in his garden.

The End of InfoFi

The X Platform's reform of the cryptocurrency section revolves around one person.

Nikita Bier, a name well-known in Silicon Valley's product circle. If you look at his track record, you'll find that this is not the impulsive move of a traditional executive. Instead, Bier is the master of viral spread. He has founded tbh and Gas—two social apps that drove American teenagers crazy, with the former sold to Facebook and the latter to Discord. His specialty lies in exploiting human nature's weaknesses to drive traffic.

It is precisely because he is an expert in creating viral content that he understands better than anyone else what kind of traffic is toxic.

After joining X to lead product growth, Bier quickly set his sights on the InfoFi projects. These projects appeared prosperous but were actually built on a logic contrary to the X Platform: replies as mining.

In the Kaito or Cookie model, every reply and like under a tweet is aimed at earning the project's token points. This external incentive mechanism has led to disastrous consequences, with much of the content being AI-generated nonsense, meaningless praise, and mechanized spam overwhelming the platform. Bier referred to it as AI sludge.

So, rather than keeping the API revenue of millions of dollars given for free for a year, he chose to stop these projects. He was blunt in his announcement: it was for user experience. But beneath this lofty reason lies a deeper strategic conflict: the pricing power of attention.

Only X Can Define What Is "Good Content"

Musk is not against users making money on X, but he not only wants you to make money, he wants you to make money according to his rules.

The original sin of InfoFi projects is that they have built a reward system independent of X. This system tells users, "As long as you generate a lot of traffic, you will be rewarded." This is fundamentally at odds with the official creator incentive program that X is vigorously promoting.

So what did X's official incentives evolve into by 2026? The current X no longer simply pays for ad impressions, but has shifted to a more advanced metric: interaction from Premium users.

This means that if 1000 bots or fake accounts like your tweet, you may not earn a penny; but if a certified, real industry expert retweets your opinion, your income weight will increase significantly. X even punishes accounts that engage in mutual data boosting through algorithms.

Musk's logic is clear: he wants the most useful messages, the latest news, and the most authoritative comments to flow on the X platform.

Getting rid of InfoFi is, on the surface, anti-spam, but in reality, it is a reclaiming of incentive power. Musk wants all creators to understand: the only way to profit on X is to produce high-quality content that resonates with real users.

Only when the comment section is no longer a dumping ground for bots can new users intuitively feel the value here. They will discover that they can see the most worthwhile messages here, rather than being forced to watch performances for airdrops.

From the Highest-Quality Information to the Most Direct Transactions

When the weeds in the garden are cleared away, the once obscured paths are revealed. This is the second step of X's recent transformation: turning information directly into funds.

While cleaning up third-party APIs, X announced the official launch of Smart Tags in February. This is not a simple hyperlink, but a native integration of financial data.

Previously, when you saw a $Ticker in a tweet, it might have just been a plain symbol, or even pointed to the wrong asset due to name collisions. In the new system, when you discuss a cryptocurrency or stock, X will accurately identify it, display real-time price charts, relevant news, and even future trading entry points.

Why do this? The flow of funds is fundamentally the monetization of information.

In the financial market, especially in the cryptocurrency market, news is everything. A piece of news about regulatory approval can instantly translate into billions of dollars in buying volume; a tweet about a technical vulnerability can also instantly trigger panic selling. In the past, this process was fragmented: you see news on X, then hurriedly switch to Binance or Coinbase to trade, even a delay of a few seconds could mean missing out on an opportunity.

Musk's vision is to eliminate these few seconds of "friction."

Imagine this scenario:

On X, the first thing you see is a piece of significant positive news that has been verified by Premium users through high-frequency interaction, instead of being drowned out by AI-generated noise. Intelligent tags directly highlight the key words in this news. You click on the tag, without leaving the app, and immediately see the market data, and even complete fund transfers through the integrated payment function.

This is Musk's vision of the future form of X, a prototype of the "Everything App."

The Ultimate Goal of Moving Towards the Everything App

Many people think that a super app is like the WeChat model, where all functions such as chatting, ride-hailing, food delivery, etc., are crammed into one app. But in Musk's understanding, the path to X's super app is more like a combination of the "Bloomberg Terminal + City Square."

In the Western internet world, no platform is like X, which monopolizes the first point of global breaking news. Whether it's a political election, a sports event, or cryptocurrency market trends, "news happens on X" has become an established fact.

Now, Musk's goal is to make "trading happen on X."