Recently, a phenomenon worth noting has emerged, helping to better understand the complexity of Web3 entrepreneurship and platform ecosystems.

Speaking of the KAITO project, it has been operating quietly since 2022 and only gained attention in 2024 with the launch of the yaps product. The positioning of this product sounds quite legitimate—encouraging users to share Web3 insights on the X platform. But if you understand the original meaning of the word yaps, you'll realize it’s actually an invitation for users to spew "tedious nonsense and rambling."

KAITO’s profit logic is straightforward: encourage users to create content, and they can earn rewards for posting. However, the direction of content production is entirely dictated by the sponsors—whoever needs certain market opinions is incentivized to produce related content. This approach is known in the industry as "mouth-labor," meaning zero-cost input with pure profit gained through discourse rights.

Honestly, this business model isn’t new; it has been present in the Web3 community for a long time. KAITO’s cleverness lies in productizing it and packaging it with a high-end-sounding concept—InfoFi (Information Finance). Users earn points, exchange NFTs, and receive token rewards, creating a fairly complete experience chain. You have to admit, this is a quite creative Web3 business model practice.

However, just three days ago, everything was shattered. The product lead of the X platform publicly announced that all products incentivizing users to post would be banned, and the API access for these developers would be restricted.

The reason is very pragmatic: such incentive mechanisms do not improve content quality but instead flood the platform with大量低质、重复的营销信息—large amounts of low-quality, repetitive marketing content. This case also reflects a deeper issue—when platforms open content incentives, how to balance innovative business models with a healthy ecosystem.