This Is What the End of InfoFi Looks Like

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By JuneJan 16, 2026

The InfoFi era collapsed the moment attention became yield. X’s API ban simply exposed the truth: once posting is incentivized, quality dies and noise wins.

X finally snapped.

The crackdown on InfoFi apps is not some ideological shift against crypto. It is a cleanup operation. For months, timelines have been drowning in AI sludge, templated replies, and engagement farming. Most of it traces back to one thing: pay people to post, and they will post anything.

InfoFi, short for Information Finance, turned engagement itself into yield. Threads, replies, likes, and interactions became extractable assets rather than expressions of thought. Platforms like KaitoAI and CookieDAO scaled it efficiently. When tokens are on the line, quality always loses to volume.

On January 15, 2026, Nikita Bier stopped dancing around it. X is pulling API access from apps that reward posting. The reason was stated plainly: AI slop and reply spam. At the same time, X has been rebuilding aggressively with xAI, pouring resources into infrastructure, GPUs, and ranking systems designed to surface real engagement rather than synthetic activity.

Pivot or Die

Projects had no choice but to pivot.

KaitoAI moved fast. Yaps is gone. In its place is Kaito Studio, a hard pivot from open-ended engagement farming toward curated creator infrastructure. Fewer creators, higher standards, and direct brand matching with vetted KOLs instead of raw posting incentives. The expansion plan tells the same story: beyond X into YouTube and TikTok, and beyond crypto into finance and AI.

CookieDAO followed with damage control rather than reinvention. The roadmap remains intact. Cookie Pro is still positioned for a Q1 release. Campaigns are being resolved case by case through snapshots. $COOKIE remains the core of the ecosystem. The messaging has been calm, almost excessively so, which only amplified speculation.

What the Chain Revealed

Given the timing of token movements and the speed of the announcement, whispers about advance warning were inevitable.

At the same time, the blockchain was already signaling something was off.

Kaito’s multisig contract had previously distributed 24 million $KAITO tokens across five addresses. One of those addresses moved its entire 5 million $KAITO balance to Binance a week before the announcement.

It feels like a clean exit.

Public messaging, meanwhile, remained calm, almost unnervingly so. When you line that up with the token flows, the speculation around early knowledge does not feel particularly far-fetched. Markets reacted the way they always do. $KAITO fell nearly 20%. $COOKIE dropped 12.9%. Liquidity disappeared, and panic filled the vacuum.

And the pressure is not over yet.

More than 25.79 million $KAITO, roughly $14.16 million, is currently staked across 17,754 addresses. According to Dune data compiled by @rudexxx, the seven-day unstaking cooldown has effectively trapped these tokens, forcing holders to sit through the drawdown. The chart shows a clear spike ahead: on day seven alone, nearly 4.85 million $KAITO is scheduled to unlock, far exceeding the amounts seen on previous days.

Noise, One Day Too Early

On January 14, one day before the hammer fell, Noise announced a $7.1 million seed round led by Paradigm. Perfect timing, or catastrophic timing, depending on how charitable you feel.

There is no yes-or-no resolution. Instead, it positions itself as a stock market for attention, where users trade on whether narratives, brands, or trends will remain relevant over time.

That distinction matters, but it does not fully insulate them. Noise did not cause the spam wave, yet its attention oracle relies heavily on Kaito’s social data. And Kaito is actively dismantling its old InfoFi mechanics while moving away from X-centric data flows entirely.

So even if Noise survives the API ban on a technical level, the foundation beneath it is shifting fast. On X, the reaction has been ruthless. Memes everywhere. Switched from MegaETH to Base. Raised big. Then the API ban lands the very next day.

Absolute cinema.