「What if we could buy and sell cryptocurrency directly on a world-class social media platform?」

It has always been a dream for the crypto community, but dreams turning into reality always come so suddenly.

On January 11, X (Twitter) Product Lead Nikita Bier announced that the Smart Cashtags feature will be publicly launched next month. This feature will allow asset tickers appearing in tweet content to be accurately linked to the referenced asset, especially cryptocurrencies that can be accurately linked based on the token's contract address. When users click on these tickers in tweets, they will be able to see the corresponding real-time price trends and all discussions on X around that asset.

Nikita Bier shared a preview image of the feature in the tweet, where we can see the appearances of $BTC, $BONK, and $BASE, as well as an interface for buying and selling NVIDIA stock.

Someone in the comments asked, "Does this mean that in the future, we will be able to trade directly on X using a self-hosted wallet or CEX plugin?" The response received was a pair of eyes representing the possibility.

But on the day before this announcement, the crypto community was still in the midst of a "group riot" on X, with Nikita Bier as the target of condemnation. It was like the regional warlords had just assembled to launch an attack on Dong Zhuo, only for Dong Zhuo to disband all his soldiers directly and then invite everyone to revive the Han dynasty together, leaving people bewildered. Is this a "crypto's way is precious" movement that will allow us to trade crypto on Twitter? Or is there a hidden trace that we have overlooked?

「Crypto's Way Is Precious」 Movement

Nikita Bier is often seen under various tweets related to X product issues, and as a product lead, he surfs on X quite a bit every day. Originally, he just answered a simple question—someone thought it would be better if tweet links shared on iMessage directly displayed the tweet content as the link preview image. He replied that this happens when iMessage fetches an error or includes content from sensitive tweets. Then, at this moment, a crypto player followed up under Nikita's reply, saying, "Yo, what's up with crypto Twitter? I can't see either the people I follow or my friends' (posted content)."

Next, Nikita's response directly became the catalyst for the "CoinLivesMatter" movement:

"In October of last year, a new rumor began spreading on Crypto Twitter, claiming that as long as you engage in a large number of daily comments, you could boost engagement. The reality is, each time you tweet, it consumes your daily exposure, and we cannot show all your tweets to your followers every day, as the average user only reads 20-30 tweets per day."

"Crypto Twitter users waste their daily exposure by excessively posting 'gm' greetings, and then when they want to post serious content, such as an announcement about a project, they have no exposure left and then blame the algorithm for being unfriendly to Crypto Twitter. Crypto Twitter is self-sabotage, nothing to do with the algorithm."

"gm," the abbreviation for "good morning," is not only the most commonly used greeting among Crypto Twitter users but is also a significant part of Crypto culture. Nikita simply wanted to use it as an example of low-value Crypto Twitter content in his mind, but the 'gm' example was so bad that it was akin to saying that in real life, saying hello is considered creating noise in a public setting and thus being muted. Coupled with past events and issues such as the banning of English-speaking KOLs like mitch and Mr.Frog, as well as meme coin project teams like nubcat, and the proliferation of low-quality comments from AI-generated texts in InfoFi projects like Kaito, Crypto Twitter users' anger erupted."

DogeDesigner provided a detailed explanation of Nikita's response and concluded that meaningful, high-quality content should be posted, while meaningless short comments and content should be limited. Although this explanation was valid, it clearly only added fuel to the fire. After Nikita deleted his above response, DogeDesigner also deleted the tweet because users flagged the tweet as "inaccurate" based on Nikita's subsequent new response.

Nikita's updated statement is that only if you aimlessly flood a tweet with 'gm' or promote a coin relentlessly in the comments section without relevance to the tweet's content will it be considered spam and be throttled.

However, after the spread of emotions, this coping mechanism became ineffective. At this point, Musk jumped in with explosive news — the content recommendation algorithm of X is going to be updated, open-sourced within a week, and will receive updates every 4 weeks, continuously open-sourcing the updates. At this stage, the "Coinfate Lives" movement has unleashed astonishing energy — never before has a top-tier social media announced plans to open-source its content recommendation algorithm, marking a historic first. This all unfolded after the crypto community collectively retaliated against Nikita in anger.

Here, we interject with a response from the crypto community. While direct insults towards Nikita are abundant, let's look at something more intriguing:

Above is an article from chimpfone titled "Money, AI, Jobs," containing only these three words throughout, mocking Nikita's "garbage information theory." This creative approach received recognition and praise from Solana:

Solana's co-founder toly quoted a tweet from Nikita suggesting that the current crypto community is a good opportunity to stand out by creating high-quality content across platforms, with the quoted content being, "gm."

Nikita also replied with "gm" under toly's tweet, creating a show-stopping moment

Solana took the lead in this "Coinfate Lives" movement, displaying a keen understanding of the online pulse. Their masterpiece included a reference to Nikita's deleted reply, stating, "Using our final exposure of the day to bring you this important message from Nikita, Solana."

@boneGPT's "Nikita Boar" meme, first created in November last year, went viral due to this event. This meme depicts Nikita himself as a boar. When faced with this meme, Nikita demonstrated the crypto community's preferred way of handling such situations — by personally joining in the fun.

Nikita: Who made this video?

Beeple also took this pig image meme and created a meme image criticizing Nikita in the crypto community. In response, Nikita said that this artwork should be hung in the Louvre. He even posted this image on his Instagram with a caption, "Unlocked Achievement: Become Beeple's creation."

So, the root cause of the whole event is almost explained. In fact, Nikita is not responsible for X's content recommendation algorithm, but inadvertently, he almost overnight became the most hated person in the crypto community. He himself found this situation quite amusing, and even more amusingly, Musk once again came out to clarify — Nikita indeed has no relation to the content recommendation algorithm; we have a team of dedicated engineers working on that.

Leading the charge, Solana, on the other hand, also received a playful jab from Nikita — "My holdings are in my bio." And in Nikita's bio, it says, advisor @solana.

Was the whole thing a coincidence or a deliberate act? I am inclined to believe that it was a coincidence that sparked collective emotions, followed by an intentional market strategy. Nikita mentioned several times later, "I intentionally baited you all for the release of the new feature," but this was obviously somewhat contrived and deviated slightly from the initial post deletion and serious explanations. Perhaps X's team had already prepared these new features internally and planned to release them at the right time, but this inadvertent communication error this time inadvertently drew the attention of the entire crypto community, turning a slip into a very flexible and timely response.

Nikita's previous experiences prove that he has the ability to transform negative public opinion into positive marketing communication.

Crisis Transformation Master

Before becoming the Product Lead at X, Nikita was already a fairly successful entrepreneur. In 2017, he founded the teen-focused anonymous compliment app TBH, which surpassed 5 million downloads just 9 weeks after launch and was quickly acquired by Facebook. During TBH's early days, he didn't spend a dime on advertising but instead targeted 3 Alabama high schools, sparking widespread curiosity by following students with a private Instagram account.

In 2022, he founded Gas, which can be described as an upgraded version of TBH. Within 3 months of launch, Gas reached tens of millions of downloads and this time generated decent revenue through a subscription model, leading to its acquisition by Discord.

Gas once faced a rumor crisis, falsely claiming that a mysterious white van was tracking Gas users, especially teenagers, to abduct them. Nikita's response at the time stated that 3% of users deleted their accounts in a day due to this non-existent white van. Nikita didn't shy away from the controversy but directly confronted the rumor as an organized conspiracy against Gas, bringing Gas to a higher level of discussion among more people. Additionally, actor Ashton Kutcher, who has long been involved in anti-human trafficking efforts, supported Nikita to turn the tide on social media, avoiding further confusion from excessive explanations.

All of these demonstrate Nikita's remarkable ability to capture and leverage attention.

Looking back at his past tweets, his early views on the crypto world were somewhat neutral or even slightly negative. However, by early 2025, he began to mention more of his love for cryptocurrency and direct usage experiences. In March 2025, he announced his role as an advisor to Solana, expressing that his views on cryptocurrency have been mixed over the years but the world has changed, making it increasingly attractive and meaningful to build applications in the crypto space.

Therefore, Solana's leading charge with Nikita feels somewhat like a love-hate relationship.

X's Ambition

After Musk's massive acquisition, his ambition has always been to turn X into an "Everything App," a superapp encompassing everything like WeChat and Alipay.

Twitter is not just a name from the past but also just a form of the past. While using it, we still don't feel much of a difference between the current X and the old Twitter, even still calling it Twitter out of habit.

Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion would have been meaningless if Twitter, still a large joyous discussion community relying on ad revenue survival as a pure social company as in the past, had not transformed. Therefore, we have seen the introduction of the paid Blue V badge and creator revenue sharing. The social network is seen as the foundation layer of the "Everything App," where the traffic entry point needs to continue to expand. Features such as editable tweets, long tweets, Community Notes for fact-checking, extended video uploads, improved Spaces, live video streaming... These updates have transformed X's content from simple text microblogging to a more diverse and in-depth experience.

Binding users to a paid ecosystem is the first step in reshaping X's business model. Using creator revenue sharing as a "lure," providing users with more creative space through feature updates, and incentivizing high-quality content to attract more paying users.

X has more ambitious plans. For example, X has a complete Grok AI integration, which has greatly assisted users in content creation, data queries, fact-checking, and even turned Grok into an entertainment tool like a "wardrobe changer," making memes on X. X's chat function has evolved into an end-to-end encrypted communication app, turning all previous group chats into inactive groups. There is also X TV, a somewhat vague memory for many, where Musk aims to turn X's video content into an app for mobile or TV viewing.

As for X Money, its payment service has obtained money transmission licenses in over 40 states in the United States. In June 2025, then X CEO Linda Yaccarino even boldly stated that users would soon be able to complete financial functions such as payments, investments, and transactions on the X platform, and the company is exploring the launch of credit or debit cards.

However, if even a social network cannot suppress competitors like Threads, how can it become the "Everything App"? Therefore, Musk said, "We still pay creators too little, and the distribution is not good enough; YouTube does much better in this regard than we do."

This ambition-induced pressure is not only about "not being good enough in creator revenue" or merely transmitted between Musk and his employees but is also transferred to users' actual perception, which is the challenge X is currently facing.

What is the actual user perception? When it comes to feature updates, there are pros and cons. For example, X has a full Grok AI integration, which is great and has greatly assisted users in content creation, data queries, fact-checking, etc. Some even occasionally use Grok as an entertainment tool, such as the "Outfit Change Machine," and so on. Grok itself has become a meme generator on X. On the downside, X's chat function is the most poorly perceived recent update by users. To achieve end-to-end encryption, the old group chats have almost all turned into inactive groups.

But what users truly perceive is that X wants everyone to "get involved," yet the result of this involvement has not provided users with a more comfortable social environment. Users have begun to lose the relaxed and humanized experience on X, with the algorithm's pursuit of viral content leaning more towards political content, ragebait, or mindlessly repeated low-quality AI-generated content. Genuine small accounts are buried, while the algorithm caters to large accounts of creators who, like "fake humans," "solve" on a social platform and take away rewards.

The deeper reason behind the "Valuing Coin Over Life" movement is users' dissatisfaction with X's attitude of "rushing everyone to do everything"—I just want to come on X every day and say "gm" to my friends, I tweet just for fun, I don't want your company to educate me, a user, on what posts I should make, and it's precisely your guidance that has ruined the previously friendly environment.

Conclusion

In an era where algorithms rule attention and big companies' profit extraction is already a silent and cruel assembly line, the "Valuing Coin Over Life" movement on X has shown a rare "human touch." Although the angered group this time is still only a small specific group of crypto players on X, what they express is not just the product manager Nikita's lack of respect for crypto culture, but also a protest against the distortion of the social environment caused by algorithms.

I think X should be glad because if these users don't feel a sense of belonging to X, they will just leave instead of collectively exploding in anger. I also think that users have reasons to be glad because this kind of protest against cold algorithms can still receive a response from the company's top management on X. Regardless of whether such a response is satisfactory, at least we are not facing a silent algorithm, but rather a human-like Nikita and even Musk.

Has the "Valuing Coin Over Life" movement come to an end? It doesn't seem so, as Nikita is still throwing shade at the CT:

"Cryptocurrency Content Views on YouTube Drop to Lowest Level Since January 2021," Nikita: "All Because of the Algorithm"

Meanwhile, he continues to engage with people, persistently deleting angry responses. For example, he proposed a metric to measure "posting ability," replacing the simple follower count metric with a ratio of followers to total posts. Someone replied to him, "This clearly doesn't work because you often delete posts." Nikita then sarcastically posted the total post count and follower count of this user:

All this chaos is the closest we have ever been to being able to shill coins on Twitter.

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