DOGE, are you hearing this? How come you’re not humping some green candles today? Elon Musk, your number one fan, is talking up crypto payments again.

Well, kinda.

According to a Financial Times report today, the Tesla/SpaceX/Twitter boss has revealed his social media platform has plans to become a super app – or “everything app” as he calls it. One that involves payments – fiat-currency payments primarily or initially, but with a nod to crypto being integrated down the line.

Twitter has reportedly begun the application process for state licenses in the United States in an effort to generate additional revenue streams outside of the advertising buck.

And it likely needs to do that pretty quick smart, too, considering the platform Musk bought for US$44 billion in October was bleeding something like US$4 million a day late last year. That’s according to the large-noggined billionaire himself, by the way. His $8 blue tick initiative can only make so much of a dent.

But Musk has been pushing for payments disruption on Twitter for quite some time, and certainly ever since he took over the joint. He does, after all, have some history in that area, having co-founded PayPal when he was a younger, and balder, man.

Back in May, he floated the idea of payments for Twitter in a pitch deck that he presented to investors, claiming that Twitter could generate as much as US$1.3 billion in payment revenues by 2028.

At the moment, Twitter only generates about US$15 million annually from its tipping and shopping payment tools.

“Twitter is already a platform on which payments happen, so it’s kind of a no brainer,” Lucy Ingham, head of content at FXC Intelligence told the FT.

 

‘There’s a role for crypto in the future’

According to the FT report, Musk said that fiat currency is the platform’s first priority, but he apparently told people familiar with the plan that crypto functionality also could be added.

Crypto users and investors, particularly those holding DOGE, have been hotly anticipating a crypto-payments integration move from Twitter since Elon Musk took the reins.

In some of his latest positive dialogue on crypto’s future (heard below in the Documenting Bitcoin tweet), Musk was careful not to mention any specific cryptocurrencies by name.

Given his liking for Dogecoin, however, it would seem an almost certainty that the leading dog-meme coin would feature large in any future crypto payments integration on the social media platform.

Thanks to Twitter’s former CEO Jack Dorsey, the platform does already provide support for Bitcoin tips via the Lightning network, as well as Ethereum, and NFT avatars for “Twitter Blue” subscribers.

There were even rumours late last year of a specific Twitter Coin in the works, although those seems to have died down for the moment.

 

Footnote: We began this article with Dogecoin, like every other coin in the top 10 by market cap, in the daily red. At the time of writing, DOGE’s ears have pricked up. It’s now by far the best-performing crypto major today, with a +4.6% gain over the past 24 hours.  

 

 

 

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