The platform that built its reputation on open communication just admitted it might never clean up its most persistent problem.
X’s Head of Product, Nikita Bier, made a stunning confession over the weekend. He said no technology on earth can fix the spam replies flooding crypto accounts, because 80% of crypto activity on X is driven by bots. That’s not a moderation failure. That’s a structural collapse.
And it’s making some of crypto’s biggest names seriously question whether X is even worth using anymore.
Bier’s Confession Flips X’s Earlier Confidence
Just weeks ago, X sounded optimistic about the spam fight. In March, Bier himself wrote that “the financial incentive to spam on X will decline enormously over the next 30 days and soon be negative.” That was a bold claim.
Now he’s walking it back hard.
“There is no technology in the world that could ever fix the spam replies of a crypto account — because 80% of crypto is simply bots,” Bier posted on Sunday. “The only path out is to enable 2nd-degree reply restrictions.”
That’s a massive shift in tone. Instead of promising a technical fix, X is now telling crypto users the problem is embedded so deep in the ecosystem that no detection system can root it out without also silencing real people.
The math here is brutal. If 8 out of every 10 accounts engaging with crypto content are automated, any filtering system aggressive enough to stop bots will almost certainly sweep up legitimate users in the process. There’s no clean surgical solution.
The 2nd-Degree Reply Restriction Plan
So what is X actually proposing? The solution Bier points to is a feature called 2nd-degree reply restrictions, currently being tested with Premium+ subscribers.
Here’s how it works. Normally, restricting replies limits who can respond to your posts. Second-degree restrictions expand that circle to include followers of your followers, while still blocking completely unknown accounts and suspected bots.
It’s a middle ground. You get broader reach within your existing network but cut off the wave of anonymous bot replies from outside it.
But here’s the honest question worth asking. Would sophisticated bot operators simply adapt? They’ve done it before. Every platform that has tried to wall off spam through network restrictions has eventually seen bots evolve to infiltrate those networks instead.
Solana’s Toly Calls X a “Horrible Website”
Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana, didn’t mince words. He called X “a horrible website.” But then he added something that tells you everything about the state of crypto communication: it’s still the least worst option available.
That contradiction came out during a broader conversation triggered by a satirical post from a Solana community member. The joke listed increasingly absurd security rules for crypto builders, including not answering X direct messages, not answering Telegram messages, not answering your door, and not responding if someone calls your name.
It was funny. It was also painfully close to reality.
The humor landed with extra weight given what happened on April 1, when the Drift Protocol suffered a $285 million exploit. Attackers didn’t find a bug in the smart contract code. Instead, they used social engineering, tricking someone into approving misleading administrative actions. No amount of code auditing would have stopped that.
So the joke about not trusting any inbound communication stopped being a joke pretty quickly.
What X Has Already Tried
To be fair, X hasn’t been sitting still. Bier has pushed several anti-spam measures since joining as Head of Product in mid-2025.
In January 2026, X revoked API access from InfoFi apps like Kaito, which rewarded users financially for posting on X. The move immediately crashed Kaito’s token price by 20% and forced the project to shut down its Yaps incentive program entirely. Paying people to post was essentially paying people to spam, and X finally cut that feedback loop.
Over the past year, the platform also purged 1.7 million bot accounts and rolled out a dislike button specifically designed to suppress low-quality replies and push spam further down threads.
More recently, X began preparing an auto-lock feature. Accounts that post about crypto for the first time would get flagged and required to verify their identity before continuing. The idea is to raise the cost of creating fresh bot accounts just to flood crypto threads.
Each of these moves made sense individually. But Bier’s latest statement suggests the cumulative effect hasn’t been enough to change the underlying dynamic.
Why This Problem Might Be Permanent
Here’s what makes this situation genuinely different from typical platform spam problems. Most spam exists because someone is making money somewhere. You fix spam by cutting off that money flow.
Crypto spam is different. The bots promoting scam tokens, phishing links, and fake giveaways are often operated by the same people who created those tokens. The spam itself is the marketing strategy. And the financial incentives baked into crypto, where a single successful scam can net millions, mean bot operators can afford to constantly rebuild and adapt.
X can purge 1.7 million bot accounts. The people running those bots can spin up 1.7 million more accounts by next week. The economics favor the spammers, and Bier seems to finally be acknowledging that reality plainly.
The crypto community deserves a better answer than “learn to live with it.” But right now, X seems to be offering exactly that, dressed up in slightly more technical language. Whether 2nd-degree reply restrictions can actually change the experience for real users or just push bots to adapt faster is the question X will have to answer in the coming months.