Behind the X platform API storm: encryption projects being banned in bulk, companies forced to pay high prices to redeem accounts?

Original Author: Golem Reprinted by: Daisy, Mars Finance

Original Title: The "X Death Game" of Crypto Projects: Accounts are Banned for Not Paying, Is Musk's "Business Harvester" Starting?

Since June, the crypto projects have faced a wave of account bans on X, where several official project accounts and related personnel accounts were frozen in bulk without warning. This includes the official account of ElizaOS and its founder Shaw's personal account, the official account of GMGN and its founder haze's personal account, as well as the official account of pumpfun and its founder Alon Cohen's personal account. Initially, the community speculated about the motives behind the bans on X, including project exit scams, regulatory pressure, and references to the "Bubble Mart" meme.

Pop Mart

However, among the various speculations, the most plausible reason is related to the violation of using third-party crawlers by cryptocurrency projects. Crypto KOL AB Kuai.Dong stated that a more credible explanation for the recent wave of account bans is aimed at data scraping activities that did not go through the official API interface. He pointed out that if a company retrieves 200 million tweets per month through the official X interface, it needs to pay over $200,000. Many projects, such as gmgn, ai16z, and eliza, opted to save costs by using third-party crawlers to obtain data, leading to mass bans.

However, on June 18, Shaw, the founder of ElizaOS, posted on the Farcaster platform accusing X officials of extortion under the pretext of unblocking his account. He stated that X officials cited his open-source code claiming that they violated certain terms of service, including selling data and selling certain content by bypassing the API key. He mentioned that if Shaw was willing to pay $50,000 per month for an enterprise license, they would stop harassing him. However, Shaw is already paying $1,000 per month for the "yellow label" certification and $200 for the developer license. Therefore, Shaw believes this is unreasonable and is considering whether to use legal means.

Shaw angrily scolded Musk on the Farcaster platform.

Following Shaw's revelations, the community speculates that the accounts of pumpfun and GMGN have been unblocked or that they have compromised on the "unblocking conditions" set by X officials. At the same time, after being unblocked, GMGN suspended X monitoring and crawling tools, while Pumpfun removed the sniping/tracking features.

To get closer to the truth, Odaily Planet Daily sought confirmation from GMGN officials regarding the reasons for its ban and unban, but GMGN refused to make a public statement on the matter, saying "there's nothing to say."

Is it that the crypto project is deliberately escaping or is X behaving poorly?

Since Elon Musk officially became the owner of Twitter (now renamed X) in October 2022, X canceled the free API in 2023 and fully implemented a high-priced paid strategy. Since then, many businesses have had disputes with X over hidden charging terms related to the API and forced upgrades to the enterprise version. However, this time, cryptocurrency companies are being collectively targeted.

In October 2024, Ervin Kalemi, the founder of the social media management platform Publer, publicly protested on the X platform against the hidden fees imposed by X officials. He stated that Publer had originally subscribed to the X enterprise-level API ($42,000/month), but starting from November 1, 2024, X officials informed him that in addition to the original monthly fee, they would also charge an additional fee of "$1 per connected account per month," which means that Publer would have to pay tens of thousands of dollars more each month.

In early 2025, users reported that X officially began cracking down on companies that utilize user-provided API Keys (BYOK) to batch retrieve X data for clients. Commercial data integration/ETL service providers such as Fivetran, Airbyte, and Stitch are all within the scope of this crackdown, with the requirement being that they must upgrade to the most expensive enterprise API. It was also mentioned that some companies have already received legal letters issued by X's legal department.

According to the price information announced by X official, upgrading the X account to the Enterprise Gold Standard costs $200 per month for the basic version, while the complete version costs $1000 per month.

Regarding the pricing of the API, X officially divides it into 3 levels. The basic version is $200 per month, the professional version is $5000 per month, and a custom solution is required for enterprises and scaled projects.

X Platform API Pricing Standards

From the above charging standards, it is evident that the X platform may indeed have hidden charges and engage in "extortion" of enterprises. This is because the existing charging standards do not provide detailed explanations on what scale and nature of enterprises need to apply for custom solutions, and the pricing standards for custom enterprise versions are also not publicly transparent. Is the API charging for different enterprises solely based on the arbitrary claims of the monopolistic X? Moreover, for enterprises, X officially controls the life and death of platform accounts and can arbitrarily ban accounts. If the enterprise does not agree to the charging plan or delays negotiation time, it is ultimately the interests of the enterprise that suffer. In such situations, most enterprises tend to "obediently pay up."

X the financial pressure behind the platform

Wielding the right to ban accounts in this way to threaten companies to pay fees may be a "shady trick" that Musk came up with to save the X platform. Before Musk completely privatized Twitter, Twitter's annual financial situation was in the red year after year, and since going public in 2013, Twitter has only made a profit in 2018 and 2019, and the rest of the fiscal year has been in the red. In 2021, the last fiscal year in which Twitter was privatized by Musk, the loss still amounted to $221 million.

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

The long-term losses have led Musk to implement a paid API model for the X platform starting in March 2023. In 2023, according to publicly available data, paid APIs contributed approximately $900 million in revenue to the X platform, accounting for 26% of total revenue; advertising revenue remains the main source of income for X, at about $2.5 billion, accounting for 75%; the remaining income comes from XPremium subscriptions and enterprise gold badge certification. Although the API fees began in 2023, Reuters reported that due to a 50% drop in advertising revenue and a heavy debt burden, Twitter's cash flow remained negative in 2023.

Since Elon Musk privatized Twitter in 2022, financial data has not been publicly disclosed. However, we can infer from third-party information that its financial situation in 2024 is also not optimistic. In an email sent to employees in February 2025, Musk stated, "Our user growth has stagnated, and our revenue is unsatisfactory; we are barely maintaining a balance between income and expenditure." A significant portion of its expenses comes from the high debt costs accumulated by Musk during the acquisition of Twitter. By the end of 2024, the annual interest expense alone was over $1.3 billion.

Therefore, under tremendous financial pressure, to generate revenue, X officially chose to reach into the pockets of enterprises that rely on the platform's API.

Platform X's dominance has a stranglehold on the throat of cryptocurrency dissemination.

However, facing financial pressure is not a reason for X to wield the big stick of freezing and impose hegemony on enterprises.

Users of X are spread across the globe, and the information covers various aspects such as entertainment, politics, and business, making it a very important channel for brand promotion and market updates for enterprises, especially for crypto companies. According to a survey by CoinGecko, 41.7% of crypto users consider X as their primary social media platform, followed by Telegram and YouTube, while 73.8% of crypto users choose to obtain crypto news through social media platforms.

Due to X having accumulated a large number of cryptocurrency users and crypto social data, it has become a cornerstone of the cryptocurrency industry, just like Ethereum and other public chains. Therefore, about 90% of cryptocurrency companies and KOLs choose to publish brand promotion and product update information on the X platform, and many Web3 task platforms also choose X as their main community interaction platform. If cryptocurrency is banned, it would effectively cut off the channels for cryptocurrency companies and KOLs to promote themselves externally.

On the other hand, the Meme, AI Agent, and InfoFi tracks that are emerging in the crypto industry in 2024 are highly reliant on the X platform. The vast majority of Meme gold dogs not only originated on X but also spread and fermented there, which is the main reason for monitoring X with dog-fighting tools; most AI Agent social training data comes from X, and Agents choose to be active on the X platform, such as AIXBT, Eliza, etc.; the InfoFi platform is even more dependent on X, with "mouth rubbing" and KOL ranking data all sourced from the X platform. If X does not allow the InfoFi platform to use the official API, this track may not exist.

Such deep dependence makes X not only a bridge but also a shackle forged by power, firmly constraining the pulse of the crypto world.

The crypto industry, which advocates for decentralized ideals, is heavily reliant on a centralized platform, akin to a freedom fighter willingly putting on shackles, a situation both shameful and reluctant. At such times, people recall those once-hopeful decentralized social utopias, such as Farcaster and Lens, which, while understanding the needs of crypto and financialization, unfortunately do not grasp social interaction and product development, making it difficult to illuminate the main pathway of crypto socializing.

This morning, I found that Shaw, the founder of ElizaOS, has deleted the post accusing X on the Farcaster platform. Does this mean that Shaw has inclined to “give in” to X? If the crypto industry continues to hand over information sovereignty to X, its hegemony may face sanctions at any time. When crypto companies become targets again, they can only swallow their pride and say nothing - "there's nothing to say."