"What if we could directly buy and sell cryptocurrencies on a world-class social media platform?"

For a long time, this has been regarded as a dream by people in the cryptocurrency community. Yet, when dreams meet reality, it always happens 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 mentioned in tweets to accurately point to the specific assets they refer to, especially for cryptocurrencies, which will be linked precisely based on the token's contract address. When users click on these tickers in tweets, they will be able to view real-time price charts and all discussions on X related to the asset.

Nikita Bier included a preview image of the feature in a tweet. In the image below, we can see the appearance of $BTC, $BONK, and $BASE, as well as an interface for buying and selling NVIDIA stocks.

Someone in the comment section asked, "Does this mean that in the future, we will be able to trade directly on X using self-hosted wallets or CEX plugins?" The response was a pair of eyes, symbolizing possibility.

But the day before this news was announced, the crypto community was already rioting on X (formerly Twitter), with Nikita Bier as their target. It was as surprising as if the eighteen warlords had just gathered to attack Dong Zhuo, only for Dong Zhuo to suddenly disband his own troops and instead invite everyone to jointly restore the Han dynasty. Was this a "crypto revolution" aiming to let us trade cryptocurrencies on Twitter? Or was there something subtle and overlooked behind the scenes?

"Currency Fate" movement

Nikita Bier often appears in tweets related to X product issues. As a product lead, he can be said to be "highly surfing" on X every day. Originally, he was just answering a simple question: someone suggested that when sharing a tweet link in iMessage, it would be better if the link preview directly displayed the tweet content. He replied that the default cover image is shown because iMessage either fetched the data incorrectly or the tweet contains sensitive content. At that moment, a crypto enthusiast followed up in Nikita's comment, asking, "Yo, what's going on with crypto Twitter? I can't see the people I follow or my friends' posts."

Next, Nikita's response directly became the spark for the "Bitcoin is precious" movement:

"In October last year, a new rumor began spreading on cryptocurrency-related Twitter, claiming that simply commenting a lot each day would help you gain followers. In reality, every time you post a tweet, it consumes your daily visibility. We cannot show all your new tweets to your followers each day, because on average, users only view 20 to 30 tweets per day."

"Crypto Twitter users spam 'gm' every day, wasting their own visibility, and then when they have serious content to post, like project announcements, they find they have no visibility left, and then they come blaming the algorithm for being unfriendly to Crypto Twitter. Crypto Twitter is committing suicide; it has nothing to do with the algorithm."

The abbreviation "gm" for "good morning" is not only the most commonly used greeting among cryptocurrency community members, but also an essential part of crypto culture. Nikita was merely trying to give an example of what he considered to be meaningless content flooding the crypto space, but his choice of "gm" as an example was particularly poor. It's equivalent to in the real world, people being forced to be muted for simply greeting each other, as if it were considered noise pollution in a public setting. Combined with previous incidents such as the English-speaking community KOLs Mitch and Mr. Frog, as well as the memecoin project team Nubcat being banned, and issues like the proliferation of low-quality AI-generated comments and content from AI accounts caused by projects like Kaito in the InfoFi space, the anger of the crypto community has now reached a boiling point.

DogeDesigner provided a detailed explanation in response to Nikita and concluded that one should post interesting, high-quality content and avoid meaningless short comments and short posts. This explanation was not problematic in itself, but it clearly had the effect of adding fuel to the fire. After Nikita deleted her previous comment, DogeDesigner also deleted the tweet, as some users had tagged it as "inaccurate" in the community report following Nikita's new reply.

Nikita's updated statement says that if you simply randomly comment "gm" (good morning) unrelated to the content of a tweet, or indiscriminately promote a certain cryptocurrency in the comment section, it will be considered spam and thus be subject to reduced visibility.

However, once the emotions had already spread, such damage control became ineffective. At this point, Musk stepped in, bringing an explosive announcement: X's content recommendation algorithm would be updated and open-sourced within a week, with updates and open-sourcing continuing every four weeks. By this point, the "Coin Fate is Precious" movement had already unleashed astonishing energy—never before had a top-tier social media platform decided to open-source its content recommendation algorithm; this was the first time in history. This event occurred right after the crypto community, fueled by anger, had begun a collective backlash against Nikita.

Here, we'll interject with a counterattack from the cryptocurrency community. There are too many people directly calling Nikita a bastard; let's take a look at some more interesting ones:

Above is an article from ChimpFone titled "Money, AI, Jobs," containing only these three words, satirizing Nikita's "junk information theory." This creative approach has been recognized and emulated by Solana:

Solana co-founder toly quoted a tweet by Nikita, which stated that the crypto space currently has low discussion levels across various platforms and is a good time to create high-quality content to stand out. The content of the quoted tweet was simply, "gm."

Nikita also replied with a "gm" under this tweet from Toly, making the comedic effect absolutely maxed out.

Solana has been a leading force in this "crypto crisis" campaign, demonstrating sharp online intuition in its execution. A classic example was referencing Nikita's now-deleted comment, accompanied by the message: "Using up our last bit of visibility for today to deliver an important message from Nikita to you—Solana."

The "Nikita Boar" meme, first created by boneGPT in November last year, has gone viral due to this incident. This meme features Nikita himself being digitally altered into a pig. In response to the meme, Nikita has demonstrated the kind of approach that is appreciated in the crypto community—he jumped into the joke himself and played along with the meme.

Nikita: Who made this video?

Beeple also created a meme using this pig image, making fun of Nikita's criticism from the cryptocurrency community. In response, Nikita said that this artwork should be displayed in the Louvre. He even posted the image on his Instagram with the caption, "Achievement unlocked: becoming Beeple's subject."

Up to this point, the cause of the entire incident has been mostly explained. In fact, Nikita isn't responsible for X's content recommendation algorithm, but by accident, he became almost the most hated person in the crypto community overnight. He himself found the situation quite absurd, and even more absurdly, Musk once again stepped in to clarify things for him—Nikita indeed has nothing to do with the content recommendation algorithm; we have a dedicated team of engineers handling that.

Leading the charge, Solana was unexpectedly called out by Nikita—who said, "My holdings are in my bio." And in Nikita's bio, it clearly states: advisor @solana.

Was the whole thing a coincidence or a deliberate act? I tend to believe it was a coincidence that triggered collective emotions, which then led to intentional market strategies. Later on, Nikita mentioned several times, "I intentionally lured you in for the new feature release," but this explanation seemed somewhat forced and slightly inconsistent with his earlier actions of deleting posts and earnestly explaining the situation. Perhaps X had already prepared these new features internally and planned to release them at the right time. This accidental misstep in communication, however, drew the entire crypto community's attention, and taking advantage of the momentum became a very flexible and timely response.

Nikita's previous experience has demonstrated his full capability to transform adverse public opinion into positive marketing communication.

Master of Crisis Transformation

Before becoming a product leader at X, Nikita was already a fairly successful entrepreneur. In 2017, he founded TBH, an anonymous liking app for teenagers, which reached 5 million downloads within 9 weeks of its launch and was quickly acquired by Facebook. In the early stages of TBH, he didn't even spend a single dollar on advertising. Instead, he targeted three high schools in Alabama and sparked widespread curiosity by following students through a private Instagram account.

In 2022, he founded another app called Gas, which can be considered an upgraded version of TBH. Within three months of its launch, Gas achieved 10 million downloads. This time, it generated substantial revenue through a paid subscription model. Subsequently, it was acquired by Discord.

Gas once faced a rumor crisis, when a rumor spread that a mysterious white van was following teenagers using Gas and kidnapping them. At that time, Nikita tweeted that 3% of users had deleted their accounts in one day due to this non-existent mysterious white van. Instead of avoiding the controversy, Nikita directly confronted the issue, stating that it was an organized conspiracy against Gas, which elevated the discussion and brought Gas to the attention of even more people. At the same time, Nikita turned the situation around on social media by gaining the support of actor Ashton Kutcher, who had long been concerned about human trafficking cases, thus avoiding further confusion through repeated explanations.

All of these demonstrate Nikita's exceptional ability to capture and utilize attention.

Looking back at his past tweets, his early views on the cryptocurrency space were neutral, and even somewhat negative. However, starting early in 2025, he began mentioning more frequently his affection for cryptocurrencies and his firsthand experiences using them. In March 2025, he announced that he had started serving as an advisor to Solana, stating that his views on cryptocurrencies had been mixed over the years, but now the world has changed, and building applications in the crypto space has become increasingly attractive and meaningful.

Therefore, Solana's leading charge against Nikita had a somewhat playful and flirtatious vibe.

X's Ambitions

After completing his massive acquisition, Musk's ambition has always been to turn X into an "Everything App"—a versatile application encompassing a wide range of services, similar to WeChat and Alipay.

Twitter is not just a name from the past, but also a former product form. Although when we use it, we still don't feel much difference between the current X and the previous Twitter, and we might still be in the habit of calling it Twitter.

Elon Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion. If Twitter remained as it was before—a purely social company that thrived on user discussions and advertising revenue—this massive acquisition would have been meaningless. Therefore, we've seen the introduction of paid Blue subscriptions and revenue-sharing for creators. The social network is now viewed as the foundational layer of an "Everything App," and the traffic entry points need to be continuously expanded. Features such as editable tweets, longer tweets, Community Notes for fact-checking, long video uploads, improved Spaces, and live video streaming—these updates not only make X's content more than just text-based microblogging, but also more diverse and in-depth.

Binding users into a paid ecosystem is the first step in transforming the X business model. Using creator revenue sharing as a "bait," we can provide users with more creative space through feature updates and attract more paying users by incentivizing high-quality content.

X has many more plans. For example, X has fully integrated Grok AI, which is excellent and greatly assists users in content creation, data queries, fact-checking, and more. People often use Grok as an entertainment tool, such as a "virtual clothing try-on machine," and Grok itself has become a meme generator on X. X's chat feature, in order to achieve end-to-end encryption, has evolved completely into a communication app, rendering old group chats essentially dead. There's also X TV, which might be less familiar to some users. Musk wants to turn X's video content into a standalone app, allowing users to watch it on their phones or televisions.

X Money, as its payment service, has obtained money transmission licenses in more than 40 U.S. states. In June 2025, Linda Yaccarino, then CEO of X, boldly stated that users would soon be able to perform financial functions such as payments, investments, and transactions directly on the X platform. She also mentioned that the company was exploring the launch of credit or debit cards.

But if even social networks can't suppress competitors like Threads, how can it become the "Everything App"? Therefore, Musk said, "We're still paying creators too little, and our distribution isn't good enough. YouTube does this much better than we do."

The pressure from this ambition is not merely about "not being good enough in terms of creators' income," nor is it limited to being passed between Musk and his employees—it has actually reached users' real perceptions. This is one of the issues X is currently facing.

What is the actual user perception? In terms of feature updates, there are both positives and negatives. For example, X has a fully integrated Grok AI, which is a great addition and has significantly helped users with content creation, data queries, fact-checking, and more. People often use Grok as an entertainment tool as well, such as a "virtual clothing try-on machine," and Grok itself has become a meme generator on X. On the negative side, X's chat feature is a recent update that has been poorly received by users. In order to implement end-to-end encryption, most of the old group chats have effectively become inactive.

What users truly perceive is that X wants to push everyone into a "rat race," but the outcome of this competition has not provided users with a more comfortable social environment. Users are gradually losing the relaxed and humanized experience on X, as algorithms increasingly prioritize viral content, often favoring political posts, ragebait (content deliberately designed to provoke arguments), or brainless, low-quality AI-generated content. Authentic small accounts are being buried, while large accounts that cater to the algorithm's incentives behave like "shills," solving algorithmic challenges on the social platform and reaping the rewards.

The deeper reason behind the "Currency is precious" movement is users' dissatisfaction with X's (formerly Twitter) approach of pushing everyone to work like beasts of burden. I just want to come to X every day and say "gm" to my friends. I post tweets just for fun. I don't want your company to tell me, as a user, what I should be posting. It's precisely this kind of guidance from you that has ruined the previously good environment.

Conclusion

In an era where algorithms dominate attention, the profit extraction by big companies has become a silent and brutal assembly line. This makes the "Bitcoin is precious" movement on X stand out as a rare display of "human vitality." Although the group angered this time remains a small, specific subset of cryptocurrency enthusiasts on X, their anger is not only directed at X product lead Nikita's disrespectful remarks toward crypto culture, but also represents a protest against the distorted social environment caused by algorithms.

I think X should feel happy because if these users didn't have a certain sense of belonging to X, they would have left immediately rather than collectively erupting in anger. I also believe users have reasons to be happy, as this protest against a cold algorithm still received a response from high-level company executives on X. Regardless of whether such a response is satisfactory, at least we are not facing a silent algorithm, but rather real people like Nikita or even Musk.

Has the "Coin is Life" movement come to an end? It doesn't seem so at the moment, as Nikita is still calling out CT:

"Views of cryptocurrency-related content on YouTube have dropped to the lowest level since January 2021," said Nikita: "It's all because of the algorithm."

At the same time, he continued to argue with people online and kept deleting comments that had angered the public. For example, he proposed a new metric for measuring "posting ability," using the ratio of follower count to total number of posts, instead of follower count alone. One person replied to him, "This clearly won't work, since you often delete your posts." In response, Nikita posted that user's total number of posts and follower count to mock them:

This kind of chaos is, however, the historical moment when we are closest to being able to trade cryptocurrencies on Twitter.

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