InfoFi is dead. Finally.
InfoFi is one of the worst things that happened to us - but it's gone now.
If you’ve been doomscrolling X recently and wondering why your feed looks like a Roomba got loose in a content farm, congrats: you’ve fallen victim of the InfoFi era.
This week, X pulled the plug by revoking API access for “InfoFi”/post-to-earn apps that pay people to post. The platform’s head of product, Nikita Bier, said the goal is to reduce the surge of AI-generated spam and reply spam, and that API access for these apps has already been revoked.
And I’m going to say the quiet part loudly: good. InfoFi wasn’t “the future of media.” It was a tax on everyone’s attention.
What InfoFi actually became (not what it promised)
In theory, InfoFi was “information meets finance” where good content gets rewarded and markets price information better. Nice story - if only it was actually possible...
In practice, it became:
Mercenary engagement: people posting because they’re paid, not because they have anything to say, i.e. our timelines got flooded with low-quality, lazy and inaccurate content.
Engagement laundering: “signals” (likes, replies, impressions) that look organic but are basically subsidized noise.
A rising tide of AI slop: if you pay per post, you incentivize volume; if you incentivize volume, you get garbage at industrial scale.
A creator economy bubble: payouts untethered from actual audience value.
X basically admitted the obvious: paying people to post at scale turns the timeline into a landfill.
Why this is a net negative for crypto
Crypto already has a reputation problem and InfoFi just poured gasoline on the fire.
It trained teams to chase vanity metrics, not adoption: If the KPI is “mindshare,” and mindshare is farmable, then your marketing becomes a game of who can print the most noise per day (and who has the biggest budget). That’s not growth.
It punished the exact people you want to hear from: Engineers, researchers, operators, founders who are actually building tend to post less and ship more. InfoFi made feeds hostile to them: every thoughtful thread got buried under “gm + token ticker + obligatory hot take.”
It created a culture of posting for the sake of posting: When rewards exist, posting becomes a job. When posting becomes a job, people stop caring about insight and optimize for output.
And the moment the rewards stop, the “community” and “vibes” evaporate. As simple as that.
The hard truth: InfoFi was yield farming for attention
We’ve seen this movie. DeFi had mercenary liquidity. InfoFi had mercenary attention.
Same pattern:
Incentives attract a flood of participants.
Metrics spike.
Everyone calls it “traction.”
Rewards taper.
The crowd vanishes.
The project discovers it never had any actual traction (or users).
So when someone says “InfoFi drove awareness,” I hear “we rented bots and called it brand building.”
The creator pay inflation problem (aka “everyone became overpriced overnight”)
InfoFi distorted the market for influence. If a segment of creators can earn extra income from posting-reward programs, then:
rates for sponsored content inflate,
expectations inflate,
and smaller teams either overpay or get drowned out.
That’s not “empowering creators”; it’s subsidizing an artificial price bubble that collapses the moment the subsidy ends.
We already have enough fake CPMs and imaginary ROI in marketing. Crypto didn’t need to invent a new genre.
“But wasn’t InfoFi good for discovery?”
Occasionally, yes. A few good creators surfaced. Some genuinely useful dashboards and leaderboards popped up.
But here’s the skeptical marketer take: the signal wasn’t worth the systemic damage.
When you attach money to posting, you don’t just incentivize “good posts.” You incentivize posts that look like good posts to an algorithm. That is a very different thing.
And platforms hate that because it’s basically an adversarial attack on the product - which brings us back to the ban.
What actually happened with X (and why it matters)
X says it’s revising developer API policies and no longer allowing apps that reward users for posting (InfoFi), explicitly citing spam and AI-slop dynamics.
The market reaction was immediate. KAITO dropped sharply after the policy shift, and the team announced they’re sunsetting Yaps (the vernacular of the announcement made it clear that they got notice of this change well in advance, though, which is a whole other topic).
Translation: when the platform pipe closes, the whole “post-to-earn” machine starts coughing up its lungs.
And that’s the point. InfoFi was built on someone else’s distribution. The second that distribution stops tolerating the game, it’s over.
“So what replaces it?” Good. Real. Boring. Stuff.
If you’re a crypto marketer (hi, welcome to the support group), this is the reset you should want.
Here’s what wins next:
Proof over posts: Ship product updates people can verify. Demos. Benchmarks. Case studies. Post less. Show more.
Reputation systems that can’t be spammed by volume: If your “cred score” goes up by posting more, you’re building a spam engine.
Distribution you actually own: Email lists. Communities. Partnerships. Events. SEO & GEO. Yes, SEO. The thing that still works while everyone pretends it’s beneath them.
Creator relationships based on fit, not farming. In other words, paying creators for product understanding, audience alignment, long-term narrative contribution, not for hitting a daily posting quota like it’s Duolingo for shills.
You know, the fundamentals that are built to sustain hype cycles.
A final, slightly mean takeaway
InfoFi didn’t “democratize finance for information.” It financialized your feed.
And when you financialize a public square, you don’t get better discourse. You get professional posters optimizing for payouts, drowning out anyone who’s not trying to make rent from replies.
So yeah: InfoFi is dead. Finally.
Now we can get back to the hard work of building things people actually use, instead of bribing the internet to pretend they care.