Elon Musk is continuing with his ambitions to integrate crypto payment options into Twitter’s payments service.
According to a Financial Times report from January 30, while Musk intends to concentrate “first and foremost” on fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar, cryptocurrency payments may follow.
According to the report, Twitter is requesting regulatory licenses from the U.S. Treasury Department and state regulators across the nation with the intention of having them in place within a year.
Like most things involving Elon Musk and cryptocurrencies, the post caused a brief increase in Dogecoin’s price, which went from $0.086 to $0.091, but it soon returned to its previous level within two hours.
Adding payments to the social media platform is something Musk has discussed since May, when he suggested transforming Twitter into a super app based after China’s WeChat.
According to him on the All-In podcast, the Chinese social media giant “does everything — sort of like Twitter, plus PayPal, plus a whole lot of things, and all rolled into one, with a wonderful UI.” You essentially live on WeChat if you’re in China.
He told investors that month that he wanted to develop payments from a $15 million company in 2023 to a $1.3 billion revenue producer by 2028.
Musk stated that since “money is inherently digital at this point… it would make sense to incorporate payments into Twitter, so it’s easy to move money back and forth” in his June 16 all-hands virtual meeting for Twitter staff.
He went on to say that a “high-trust” setting is necessary in order to make Twitter a payments app. As a member of the PayPal Mafia, Musk amassed his first fortune by turning the company that handles online payments into a titan.
In a PowerPoint deck from a different internal Twitter meeting that Musk posted online on November 26, he described his idea for “Twitter 2.0: The Everything App.” It had functions including video, encrypted direct messages, a relaunch of Blue Verified, and “Payments,” however the latter was merely a blank area rather than a mocked-up screen shot.
