X (formerly Twitter) recently made a major announcement. On January 15, platform product lead Nikita Bier officially announced changes to the developer API policy, directly disabling a category of applications—those that grow through rewarding users for posting, known in the industry as InfoFi. In simple terms: X is no longer playing the game of making money from posting.

The logic behind this decision is straightforward. While these applications are creative, their side effects are too obvious:大量AI生成的垃圾内容（业内叫AI slop）堆满了平台，评论区更是spam遍地，整个用户体验被拉低。X宁可放弃这些企业客户支付的百万美元API费用，也要把生态清理干净。诚意还是有的。

The project most affected is KAITO. Its flagship product, Yaps, is centered around incentivized posting and leaderboards, with the entire operation built on X’s API. Once the ban was announced, the system immediately became unusable. Market reaction was swift—$KAITO tokens plummeted 15-23% in a short period, dropping from around $0.70 to between $0.54 and $0.58. The related Yapybaras NFTs fared even worse, with floor prices halving by over 50%.

But KAITO’s founder Yu Hu responded quickly. Instead of sitting idly, he immediately announced a strategic shift: gradually shutting down Yaps and the incentive leaderboard system, moving toward a new product line called "Kaito Studio." The new direction abandons the unlicensed open incentive model, switching to curated and tiered collaborations, while expanding to platforms like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and others. In other words, no longer relying on a single platform, but repositioning through cross-platform marketing tools.

KAITO’s experience is not an isolated case. The entire InfoFi sector has fallen into trouble. Tokens of similar projects like Cookie DAO, Wallchain, and LOUD also dropped 10-20% accordingly. The recent market cap loss in this niche is roughly around 10%. It seems that X’s policy adjustment has directly exposed the vulnerabilities within the Web3 sector.

From another perspective, this incident highlights a bigger issue: when incentive mechanisms are poorly designed, even the best ideas can easily turn into tools for spam and garbage content. Platforms are taking content quality more seriously, and project teams need to think about how to innovate within compliant frameworks. The rapid iteration approach of projects like KAITO might offer some lessons—since the original path is blocked, horizontal expansion is a smarter move than stubbornly pushing forward.