Original Author: Golem Reposted by: Daisy, Mars Finance
Original Title: The "X Death Game" of Crypto Projects: Account Suspension Without Payment, Musk's "Enterprise Harvesting Machine" Activated?
Since June, crypto projects have experienced a wave of X account suspensions, with official project accounts and related personnel being unexpectedly batch-frozen, including the official account of ElizaOS and its founder Shaw's personal account, GMGN's official account and its founder haze's personal account, and pumpfun's official account and its founder Alon Cohen's personal account. Initially, the community had various speculations about X's motives for account suspension, including project runaway, regulatory pressure, and meme images related to "Bubble Mart".
Bubble Mart
However, among the many speculations, the most credible reason is related to crypto projects' unauthorized use of third-party crawlers. Crypto KOL AB Kuai.Dong posted that the most reliable explanation is that this wave of account suspensions targets data scraping without official API interfaces. He pointed out that enterprises need to pay over $200,000 per month to retrieve 200 million tweets through X's official interface, and many projects like gmgn, ai16z, and eliza may have used third-party crawlers to save costs, leading to centralized account suspensions.
However, on June 18, ElizaOS founder Shaw posted on Farcaster, accusing X officials of extortion under the guise of account unbanning. He stated that X officials cited his open-source code, claiming he violated certain service terms, including selling data and selling certain content by bypassing API keys. They suggested that if Shaw was willing to pay $50,000 monthly for an enterprise version license, they would stop harassing him. Shaw argued that he already pays $1,000 monthly for "gold verification" and $200 for a developer license, finding this unreasonable and considering legal action.
Shaw angrily criticizing Musk on Farcaster
After Shaw's revelation, the community speculates that pumpfun and GMGN's accounts were unbanned after compromising with X officials. After unbanning, GMGN suspended X monitoring and crawler tools, while Pumpfun removed sniping/tracking features.
To approach the truth, Odaily sought confirmation from GMGN about their suspension and unbanning reasons, but GMGN refused to publicly comment, simply saying "can't say".
Are Crypto Projects Deliberately Evading or Is X's Behavior Ugly?
Since Musk officially became Twitter's (now renamed X) owner in October 2022, X canceled free APIs and implemented high-price paid strategies in 2023. Since then, many enterprises have had disputes with X officials over API hidden fees and forced enterprise version upgrades. This time, crypto enterprises are being collectively targeted.
... [rest of the text continues in the same manner]X Platform's Hegemony, Strangling the Throat of Crypto Communication
However, facing financial pressure is not a reason for X to wield a freezing baton to impose corporate hegemony.
X's users span globally, covering entertainment, politics, commerce, and other areas. For enterprises, it is a crucial channel for brand promotion and market updates, especially for crypto companies. According to a CoinGecko survey, 41.7% of crypto users use X as their primary social media platform, followed by Telegram and YouTube. Additionally, 73.8% of crypto users choose to obtain crypto news through social media platforms.
As X has accumulated a large amount of crypto users and social data, it has become a cornerstone of the crypto industry, similar to Ethereum and other public chains. Approximately 90% of crypto companies and KOLs choose to publish brand promotions and product updates on X. Many Web3 task platforms also select X as their primary community interaction platform. If crypto is banned, it would effectively cut off the external promotion channels for crypto enterprises and KOLs.
On the other hand, the Meme, AI Agent, and InfoFi tracks that emerged in the crypto industry in 2024 are highly dependent on X platform. Most large MC memecoin not only originated on X but also spread and fermented there, which is the main reason why monitoring tools choose to track X. Most AI Agents' social training data comes from X, and Agents choose to be active on the platform, such as AIXBT and Eliza. InfoFi platforms are even more dependent on X, with "mouth rubbing" and KOL ranking data sourced from X. If X does not allow InfoFi platforms to use official APIs, this track might cease to exist.
This deep dependence has made X not just a bridge, but a lock of power that firmly controls the pulse of the crypto world.
The crypto industry, which advocates for decentralization ideals, is highly dependent on a centralized platform, which is as shameful and unwilling as a freedom fighter voluntarily wearing shackles. At such moments, people recall those decentralized social utopias once full of hope, such as Farcaster and Lens. While they understand crypto needs and financialization, they unfortunately do not comprehend social interaction and product development, failing to illuminate the main channel of crypto social platforms.
This morning, I noticed that ElizaOS founder Shaw has deleted his post criticizing X on the Farcaster platform. Does this mean Shaw is leaning towards "surrendering" to X? If the crypto industry continues to hand over information sovereignty to X, its hegemony could impose sanctions at any time. When crypto companies become targets again, they can only swallow their grievances—"unable to speak".
