In the frenzied early hours of May 21, 2025, something unusual was happening on Crypto Twitter. Creators were flooding into a new platform called Cookie Snaps, lured by promises of rewards for their posts and a referral system that offered 10% of their recruits' earnings for life. The first ten hours brought 10,000 sign-ups. By the end of the day: 25,825.
A week later, that figure had doubled to 52,000.
Eight months after that, Cookie Snaps was gone entirely—not felled by a better competitor or user exodus, but by a single policy shift from X, the platform it had built upon like a house on rented land.
What happened in between offers a stark lesson for anyone building in the tokenized creator economy: explosive growth means nothing if your foundation can be yanked away overnight.
The Viral Mechanics
Cookie DAO pitched Cookie Snaps as something between a creator marketplace and an influence marketplace. Launched as part of the cookie.fun v1.0 alpha, it promised to track and reward content that moved the needle for crypto projects—what the company called "mindshare" on Crypto Twitter.
The growth was legitimately startling. Thirty-six hours in, the platform claimed 36,538 creators. By May 28, Cookie3's own newsletter put the figure at 52,000, with 35,000 of those joining in just the first 48 hours. For comparison, that velocity rivaled some of the fastest consumer app rollouts crypto has seen.
The referral structure had something to do with it. Early adopters didn't just join—they became recruiters, incentivized by that lifetime 10% cut of their invitees' SNAPS points. Compounding network effects, the kind venture capitalists dream about. The kind that can also spiral into something else entirely.
Real-Time Scoring, Gamified Influence
Here's how it worked, at least in theory: Cookie Snaps deployed AI to scan Crypto Twitter in real time, evaluating posts for relevance, narrative alignment with specific projects, and engagement. Creators earned SNAPS points for posts that cleared the bar. Projects could launch campaigns with defined parameters and reward structures.
The first major test case came from Spark, part of the Maker/Sky ecosystem. According to Cookie3's materials, the multi-phase Spark campaign that ran from May through June 2025 brought in 17,000+ new "snappers" in under five weeks and generated what the company claimed was an 8,200% mindshare lift. (Those numbers, it's worth noting, come straight from company case studies—not independent verification.)
Later campaigns got more sophisticated. LAB's late-2025 effort introduced cSNAPS multipliers and something Cookie3 branded "Attention Capital Markets," which converted SNAPS into guaranteed token allocations for top contributors. BOB's integration in July distributed $350,000 in BOB tokens, split between the top 500 snappers and COOKIE stakers.
Leaderboards made everything competitive. "Social cards" made metrics shareable. A "Bubble Map" visualization tool turned influence into something you could see, track, chase.
Everything was designed to make attention legible, quantifiable, tradable.
The InfoFi Moment
Cookie Snaps wasn't alone in this space. It existed in a category that came to be called InfoFi—platforms rewarding users for creating information and attention. Its main rival was Kaito, which ran a program called Yaps that rewarded research and analysis with its own point system.
Reports varied, but Kaito appeared to have somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 active "Yappers" before the sector imploded—though pinning down exact figures is difficult given the opaque nature of these platforms.
The two took different philosophical approaches. Kaito positioned itself as an intelligence layer for crypto. Cookie focused on campaign-driven creator marketing. But both shared a critical dependency: X's API and data infrastructure.
When Cookie experienced X data collection outages in late summer 2025, SNAPS updates simply stopped. A warning sign, perhaps more obvious in hindsight than it seemed at the time.
Cookie3, the company behind Cookie DAO, had raised $2.5 million in a 2022 seed round, then another $5.5 million in May 2024 from backers including Spartan Group, Animoca Brands, GSR, and ChainGPT. CEO Filip Wielanier and CTO Wojtek Piechociński had initially built Cookie3 as a blockchain behavioral analytics platform before partnering with Cookie DAO on the creator marketplace pivot.
Reasonable pedigree. Decent backing. A product that, for a few months anyway, seemed to be working.
The Abrupt End
On January 15, 2026, X's Head of Product, Nikita Bier, announced new policy revisions, as reported by multiple crypto news outlets. Apps that rewarded users for posting would no longer be permitted. The stated rationale: "AI slop & reply spam."
The dominoes fell quickly.
Kaito announced it would sunset Yaps and pivot to "Kaito Studio," a curated creator marketing platform expanding beyond crypto to YouTube and TikTok. The KAITO token shed somewhere between 15% and 20% of its value within hours, according to multiple reports from mid-January.
Cookie DAO followed suit on January 15-16, 2026, announcing the discontinuation of Snaps and all creator activities. (Multiple crypto news outlets captured the announcement at the time, though the original post itself isn't readily accessible now.) The platform that had signed 52,000 creators in its first week was suspended eight months into its existence.
Just like that.
What the Wreckage Reveals
The technical explanation is straightforward enough: Cookie Snaps built entirely on X's infrastructure with no backup plan. The AI needed X's data to scan posts, calculate scores, distribute rewards. When X changed its API policies, the scaffolding collapsed.
But there's a more uncomfortable strategic question. Did Cookie DAO create a system that inevitably produced exactly what X banned it for?
The referral mechanics rewarded aggressive recruitment. The point systems gamified metrics that were already heavily gamed. When X cited "AI slop & reply spam" as justification, it was describing—fairly or not—the predictable outcome of paying people to post at scale.
Some reports from mid-January 2026 hinted that Cookie DAO was exploring discussions with X, though no confirmed relaunch has been announced. As of recent checks, Cookie3's marketing page for Cookie Snaps remains live, still claiming to be "trusted by 350+ crypto companies" and able to "activate a 200K+ network"—language that doesn't acknowledge the January shutdown at all.
The Lessons, If Anyone's Listening
To be fair, Cookie Snaps delivered on its initial promises for a time. Creators onboarded rapidly. Engagement metrics existed and were measurable. Campaigns ran: Spark went for weeks; Sapien's June 2025 effort reportedly generated 50,000+ influencer posts in seven days (per company materials); Ten Protocol's September campaign completed successfully.
But the architecture was brittle in a way that perhaps should have been more obvious. Every campaign, every reward, every data point depended on continued access to X's infrastructure. When that access vanished, so did everything else.
The contrast with Kaito's response is instructive. Kaito pivoted to a multi-platform model. Cookie suspended operations.
For founders building in the tokenized creator economy, the takeaway isn't that incentives don't work—it's that building on someone else's platform, especially one as policy-volatile as X, demands contingency plans that Cookie Snaps never developed. Or at least never implemented.
The space will keep evolving, of course. The next generation of platforms will need to solve for decentralization not just in their marketing materials, but in their actual infrastructure—building systems resilient enough to survive when centralized gatekeepers change the rules without warning.
Cookie Snaps proved you can onboard 52,000 creators in a week. It also proved that growth built on borrowed ground can disappear just as quickly. Whether anyone building the next iteration was paying attention remains to be seen.
