Solana and Twitter team up, now you can trade on Twitter

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

All along, this has only been seen as a dream by people in 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 that appear in tweet content to accurately point to the referenced asset, particularly enabling cryptocurrencies to be precisely linked based on the token's contract address. When users click on these tickers in the tweets, they will be able to see the corresponding real-time price trends and all discussions on X regarding that asset.

Nikita Bier attached a preview image of this feature in the 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 stock.

Someone in the comments asked, 「Does this mean that in the future, we will be able to trade directly on X via 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 was made, people in the crypto community were still having a 「Twitter Riot」 on X, and Nikita Bier was the target of condemnation. It was like the various warlords had just gathered to launch an attack on Dong Zhuo, but Dong Zhuo directly disbanded his soldiers and invited everyone to work together to revive the Han Dynasty. A 「Revive Crypto」 movement, will it allow us to trade coins on Twitter? Or is there a hidden trace that we have overlooked?

「Revive Crypto」 Movement

Nikita Bier often appears under various tweets related to X product issues, and as a product lead, he also surfs intensively on X every day. Originally, he just answered a simple question. Some people thought it would be better if the iMessage sharing tweet link displayed the tweet content directly as the link cover image. He replied that this was due to iMessage's error in fetching or containing sensitive tweet content to display the default cover image. At this time, a crypto player followed up under Nikita's reply, 「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 "Price of Coin" movement:

“In October last year, a new rumor began spreading on Crypto Twitter, claiming that as long as you commented in large numbers every day, you could increase your follower count. The reality is, every time you tweet, it consumes your daily exposure, and we cannot show all your new tweets to your followers every day because on average, users only read 20-30 tweets per day.”

“Crypto Twitter users waste their exposure by spamming 'gm' every day, and then when they want to share serious content, such as project announcements, they have no exposure left and then blame the algorithm for being unfriendly to Crypto Twitter. Crypto Twitter is self-sabotage, it has 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 crucial part of Crypto Twitter culture. Nikita just wanted to use it as an example of the low-value content flooding the Crypto Twitter space in his mind, but the “gm” example was so bad that it was like greeting people in real life being considered noise in a public setting and being muted forcefully. Coupled with previous incidents such as the banning of English-speaking KOLs like mitch and Mr.Frog, as well as meme coin projects like nubcat being banned, the proliferation of low-quality comments in AI-generated articles due to InfoFi projects like Kaito, the Crypto Twitter community's anger erupted.

DogeDesigner provided a detailed explanation of Nikita's response and concluded that meaningful, high-quality content should be posted, and meaningless short comments and content should be reduced. While this explanation was valid, it apparently only added fuel to the fire. After Nikita deleted his above response, DogeDesigner also deleted the tweet because users later marked it with a "misleading" community tag based on Nikita's subsequent new response.

Nikita's updated statement is that if you mindlessly spam 'gm' or promote a coin unrelated to the tweet's content in the comments section, then it will be considered junk information and subject to throttling.

However, once the sentiment spread, this kind of patching became ineffective. At this point, Musk jumped in with an explosive announcement — the X content recommendation algorithm will be updated and open-sourced within a week, with updates every 4 weeks thereafter, continuing to be open-source. At this stage, the "Coinfate Is Precious" movement had already gained astonishing momentum — never before had a top-tier social media company open-sourced its content recommendation algorithm, making this an unprecedented first. This all unfolded after the crypto community collectively retaliated against Nikita out of anger.

Here, we interject with a counterattack from the crypto community. Directly calling Nikita a jerk is too common; let's look at something more interesting:

Above is an article by chimpfone titled "Money, AI, Jobs," which only contains these three words throughout, mocking Nikita's "garbage information theory." This creative technique has been recognized and emulated by Solana:

Solana's co-founder toly quoted a tweet from Nikita suggesting that now is a good time for the crypto community to shine on various platforms by creating high-quality content, and the quoted content was simply, "gm."

Under toly's tweet, Nikita also replied with a "gm," maximizing the showmanship

Solana can be considered the vanguard in this "Coinfate Is Precious" movement, with its operations demonstrating a keen sense of the internet's pulse. One of its masterpieces included referencing Nikita's now-deleted reply and appending, "Using up our last exposure today to deliver an important message from Nikita to you, Solana."

@boneGPT's "Nikita Boar" meme, first created in November last year, went viral due to this event. This meme portrays Nikita himself as a pig. When faced with this meme, Nikita displayed the crypto community's favored way of responding — personally engaging in the meme.

Nikita: Who made this video?

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

So, the whole incident's cause is almost explained here. In fact, Nikita is not responsible for X's content recommendation algorithm, but one small mistake made him almost overnight the most hated person in the crypto community. He found it quite amusing himself, and even more amusingly, Musk once again came out to clarify for him – Nikita really has nothing to do with the content recommendation algorithm; we have a team of engineers dedicated to that.

Leading the charge, Solana, on the other hand, was then turned against by Nikita — "My holdings are in my personal profile." Nikita's personal profile states, Advisor @solana.

Was the whole thing a coincidence or intentional? I tend to think it was a coincidence that triggered a collective emotion, followed by an intentional market strategy. Nikita mentioned several times later on, "I intentionally led you on for the release of a new feature," but this was clearly somewhat deliberate, deviating 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 accidental communication mistake sparked the entire crypto community's attention, turning an uphill battle into a very flexible and timely response.

Nikita's previous experience proves that he has the ability to turn negative public opinion into positive marketing and communication.

Crisis Transformation Master

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

In 2022, he founded Gas, which can be called 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, with rumors circulating that a mysterious white van was tracking teenagers using Gas and kidnapping them. Nikita's tweet at the time stated that 3% of users deleted their accounts in a day because of this non-existent mysterious white van. Nikita didn't shy away from the controversy but directly confronted it as an organized conspiracy against Gas, bringing Gas to a higher level of discussion visibility. Additionally, with actor Ashton Kutcher's support, who has long been involved in human trafficking cases, the social media situation was turned around to avoid further confusion.

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

Looking back at his past tweets, his views on the crypto space in the early years were neutral, even somewhat negative. It wasn't until early 2025 that he began to mention more of his love for cryptocurrency and his direct usage experience. In March 2025, he announced that he had started serving as an advisor to Solana, stating that his view of cryptocurrency had been mixed over the years, but the world has changed now, and building applications in the crypto space has become increasingly attractive and meaningful.

Therefore, Solana's leading charge with Nikita has a bit of a love-hate relationship vibe.

X's Ambition

After Musk's huge acquisition, his ambition has always been to turn X into an "Everything App," an all-encompassing app like WeChat or Alipay.

Twitter is not only a thing of the past but also just a past product form. Although when we use it, we still don't feel much difference between the current X and the former Twitter, and we even still habitually call it Twitter.

Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter cost $44 billion. If Twitter were still the same as before, a fun discussion-oriented, ad-revenue-based social company, this massive acquisition would be meaningless. Therefore, we have seen the introduction of the paid Blue V badge and creator revenue sharing. The social network is seen as the foundational layer of an "Everything App," where the traffic entry point needs to continuously expand. Updates such as editable tweets, long-form 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 profound form.

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

X has more ambitions. For example, X has a complete Grok AI integration, which has significantly assisted users in content creation, data queries, fact-checking, and even turned Grok into an entertainment tool, such as a "clothing changer." X's chat function has evolved into an end-to-end encrypted communication app, effectively turning previous old group chats into inactive groups. There is also X TV, a somewhat vague memory for many. Musk hopes to turn X's video content into an app for mobile or TV viewing.

X Money, as its payment service, has obtained money transmission licenses in over 40 states in the United 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 on the X platform. The company is also exploring the introduction of a credit or debit card.

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

This ambition-induced pressure is not just about "not being good enough in creator revenue sharing" or merely about communication between Musk and his employees; it has permeated into users' actual perception, which is a challenge X is currently facing.

What users truly perceive is not what new features X has updated or whether they are good or bad, but a holistic experience—X aims to get everyone "hyped up," following the company's ambition and demands to generate so-called viral content, or else you are deemed worthless to this platform. Users have not gained a more comfortable social environment through each update but have started to lose the relaxed and humanized experience on X. The algorithm's pursuit of virality is increasingly leaning toward political content, Ragebait, or mindless repetitive low-quality AI content. Genuine small accounts are buried, while the incentive-driven algorithm favors large creator accounts that act like "bots," "solving" the puzzle on a social platform and reaping rewards.

The deeper reason behind the "Coin Life Matters" movement is users' dissatisfaction with X's "herding everyone like cattle" attitude—I just want to come to 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 to make, and it is your guidance that has messed up the previously good environment.

Conclusion

In an era where algorithms rule attention, big companies' profit extraction has become a silent and brutal assembly line, making the "Coin Life Matters" movement on X show a rare "human touch." Although the angered group this time is still only a small part of the specific crypto players on X, what they are expressing is not just the lack of respect for crypto culture hinted at by X's product lead Nikita's words but also a protest against the distortion of the social environment caused by algorithms.

I think X should be glad because if these users didn't feel a sense of belonging to X, they would just leave instead of collectively expressing anger. And I also think users have reasons to be glad because this protest against the cold algorithm on X has received a response from the company's top management. Whether such a response is satisfactory or not, at least we are not facing a silent algorithm but rather Nikita and even Musk as living human beings.

Has the "Coin Life Matters" movement come to an end? It doesn't seem so at the moment because Nikita is still firing shots at CT:

"Viewership of cryptocurrency-related content on YouTube drops to its lowest level since January 2021," Nikita: "All because of the algorithm"

At the same time, he is also engaging with people continuously, deleting replies that spark outrage. 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, saying, "This obviously doesn't work because you often delete posts." Nikita then posted the total post count and follower count of this user for mockery:

This tumult, however, brings us closest to the historic moment when we can shill coins on Twitter.