X introduces new feature for coin tagging: Smart Cashtags ignite community enthusiasm

X (formerly Twitter) recently faced strong backlash from the crypto community over plans to limit user interaction frequency. The day after social media turmoil intensified, the platform revealed a major new feature targeting crypto communities. X Product Director Nikita Bier announced that the platform is developing a financial hashtag system called “Smart Cashtags,” which can automatically recognize and link stock symbols, cryptocurrency tokens, and smart contracts, allowing crypto users to more precisely track and share financial information.

New Tool in Place: How Smart Cashtags Will Transform the Crypto Information Flow

According to Nikita Bier, the core function of “Smart Cashtags” is to address the current chaos of tags. When users input stock or crypto symbols, they will be able to explicitly specify the asset or smart contract involved. Readers can click on the tags in posts to view real-time price data, technical charts, and related discussions directly on the feed, without needing to navigate to another page, greatly optimizing information access.

Screenshots released by X show that when users type the “$” symbol, the system will automatically pop up a list of assets to choose from, including mainstream projects like Bitcoin, BONK, and Base. This hints that future posts will be directly linked to dedicated asset pages, improving trading decision efficiency.

Nikita Bier emphasized: “X is one of the most important sources of financial information globally, with hundreds of billions of dollars in market capital based on what people see here.” This statement reveals X’s focus on the crypto market and its ambition to deepen its financial attributes. Solana Labs quickly retweeted the news, pointing out its significance for the crypto community—users will soon be able to precisely tag Solana ecosystem tokens and instantly view prices, charts, and related discussions, enabling seamless integration of community interaction and market information.

Sensitive Timing: Platform Ambitions Behind Community Skepticism

However, the timing of this feature’s release is particularly intriguing. Just one day before the announcement of Smart Cashtags, Nikita Bier posted a now-deleted tweet, which some users interpreted as “X might restrict high-activity users from replying to posts.” This sparked a major controversy in the highly interactive, fast-paced crypto community, with concerns that limiting replies could stifle community-driven discussions and drastically reduce content reach.

Anonymous crypto analyst KALEO bluntly criticized that restricting reply counts would not only damage the community ecosystem but is as absurd as “telling streamers they can’t chat with viewers too often.” This comment hit a nerve in the crypto community—real-time discussions, quick reactions, and high-frequency interactions are core to crypto culture, and any restrictions could weaken its appeal.

The Dilemma for the Crypto Community: Feature Benefits vs. Community Ecosystem

Although Nikita Bier did not directly address the previous controversy when announcing Smart Cashtags, and X has not confirmed whether the feature aims to “calm” angry communities, the close timing of these two pieces of news inevitably leads the crypto community to speculate—whether the platform is using one hand to restrict interactions while reaching out with the other hand to the crypto community.

This coincidence exposes a fundamental disconnect between X and crypto communities: the platform aims to build a more precise financial information ecosystem to attract institutions and professional traders, while crypto communities rely on free, high-frequency, decentralized discussion environments. Even if Smart Cashtags proves useful, it cannot compensate for the disappointment caused by restricted community interaction. For crypto users, technological progress and a tightening environment create a contradictory situation, which will test X’s ability to balance its financial ambitions with community loyalty.