X Prepares Starterpacks to Help New Users Find Crypto Feeds

The platform wants to address discovery challenges and declining engagement in niche communities. At the same time, Vitalik Buterin is calling for a shift toward decentralized social media, arguing that open, shared data layers are essential for healthier online discourse and real competition. 

X Rolls Out Starterpacks

Social media platform X is preparing to roll out a new onboarding feature called “Starterpacks,” which is designed to help new users quickly discover and follow curated groups of accounts aligned with specific interests, including cryptocurrency, technology, business, politics, and culture. The feature is expected to go live in the next few weeks.

According to X head of product Nikita Bier, the development of Starterpacks took months of preparation. In a post that was shared Wednesday, Bier said the company and its team spent a lot of time identifying and compiling top posters across more than 1,000 interest categories. These categories span both broad themes and highly specific niches.

A short video shared by Bier offered a preview of how the feature works, showing users selecting interests during onboarding and instantly following curated lists of accounts. In the cryptocurrency category alone, examples included meme coin trading, economics-focused discussions, software builders, and even what Bier described as “unhinged personalities.”

The launch comes amid ongoing discussion about declining engagement in certain parts of Crypto X. On Tuesday, Bitcoin cypherpunk Jameson Lopp pointed to data from social media entrepreneur Jean-Christophe Gatuingt indicating that posts on X containing the word “Bitcoin” dropped 32% in 2025. While the data does not necessarily reflect overall crypto engagement, it fueled concerns that discovery challenges and algorithmic shifts may be affecting participation in niche communities.

Bier argued that discovery is at the heart of the issue. In earlier comments, he explained that X functions as an interest-based graph rather than a contact-based social network, making it harder for new users to immediately see relevant content. Veteran users often spend years manually curating their timelines, which can be quite daunting for newcomers. Starterpacks, he said, are meant to compress that learning curve by guiding users directly into their preferred niches.

The idea itself is not unique to X. Decentralized microblogging platform Bluesky introduced its own “Starter Packs” in mid-2024, allowing users to create and share lists of accounts around shared interests. Meanwhile, Threads, the X competitor developed by Meta, began testing curated custom feeds in late 2024.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin argued that only platforms built on shared, open data layers can deliver healthier mass communication systems and genuine competition. In a post that was shared Wednesday on X, Buterin said he plans to fully recommit his time and attention to decentralized social ecosystems, which he views as essential to aligning online discourse with users’ interests rather than engagement-driven algorithms.

Buterin said that throughout 2026, all of the social content he has written or consumed has been accessed through Firefly, a multi-client interface that aggregates several platforms, including Lens, Farcaster, and Bluesky. He described this experience as a practical demonstration of how decentralization enables competition by allowing multiple clients to operate on the same underlying social data, rather than locking users into a single corporate-controlled feed.

“If we want a better society, we need better mass communication tools,” Buterin wrote, adding that decentralization is key to breaking monopolistic dynamics in online communication. He criticized many crypto-native social media experiments, particularly those grouped under the SocialFi label, for relying too heavily on speculative tokens as a substitute for real innovation. According to Buterin, these models often fail because they reward existing social capital and short-term price speculation, rather than content quality, thoughtful discussion, or long-term community value.

In contrast, Buterin pointed to creator-driven subscription platforms like Substack as better-aligned incentive models, where audiences directly support high-quality content without gamified engagement metrics. He urged both users and builders to spend more time participating in decentralized social ecosystems by arguing that the industry must move beyond what he described as a single centralized “info warzone” and toward a more open and competitive frontier for online interaction.

Buterin’s comments come as decentralized social infrastructure undergoes some major changes. On Wednesday, core infrastructure provider Neynar announced that it acquired Farcaster from Merkle. Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero said the move reflected a need for new leadership and direction after five years of development. Lens also saw a leadership shift this week, with Aave transferring stewardship of the protocol to Mask Network to focus on consumer-ready, on-chain social applications.