On Friday, X users began noticing that they could no longer see emojis when posting “#bitcoin” on the platform. Others discovered that other crypto hashtags including “#cryptocom, #Ethereum #bnbchain” which showed emojis earlier, do not display emojis anymore.
According to CoinDesk, the social media platform didn’t announce the removal of the emojis on its accounts or press pages, therefore, it was a silent development. This development follows the successful Bitcoin Conference 2024 in Nashville, starting on July 25, with former U.S. President Donald Trump delivering a speech.
In 2020, when X was known as Twitter, then-owner Jack Dorsey introduced the idea of popularizing crypto symbols in Unicode. The Unicode Consortium maintains this text encoding standard to support digitized text from all the world’s writing systems.
X charges companies up to $1 million to add branded emojis or symbols after a designated hashtag to help differentiate their branding from their competitors, aiding in creating a unique buzz around their customers.
Examples of such branded hashtags include #Coca-Cola during a marketing campaign in 2015 and #PokemonLetsGo, purchased in late 2018.
Sources report that the #MAGA emoji, which previously featured Republican candidate Donald Trump, was removed ahead of his scheduled appearance at the ongoing Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville.