Musk’s X Entering the Finance Industry – Will Crypto Thrive On It?

It’s never quite clear what billionaire maverick, Elon Musk, is going to do next. At one point his musings on buying X, then known as Twitter, were considered as a joke. Something to amuse his plethora of fans and make investors sweat a little bit. But then April 14th, 2022 happened, and for $44 billion, Musk actually bought Twitter.

Over the following months, it was quite difficult to decipher exactly why he made this investment. At the time, Twitter was losing followers and seemed like a social media platform that would take years to make good on such a hefty investment. It wasn’t until Elon Musk rebranded the company to X in the tail end of July 2023, that things began to become a little clearer.

In the late 1990s, Elon Musk had envisioned an online disrupter to the “boring banking industry”. Known as X.com, this was to be the “everything-store” that would accommodate any financial need, including investments, loans, purchases, and credit cards. It didn’t really work out. The world was not ready for an indie-bank that could do anything, and so X.com fell away, becoming instead one of the many sparks that eventually fuelled the fire of PayPal.

Talking Of Financial Disruptors…

This is where cryptocurrency comes into the conversation. Ever since its inception in 2009, Bitcoin – and the world of blockchain as a whole – has been pushed by Musk. Earlier in 2022, he announced that Tesla would be accepting Dogecoin, an alt-coin that was initially contrived as a joke currency. Musk himself is said to own millions of dollars worth of BTC and was said to be considering a new social-media platform that would be run through blockchain before making the Twitter deal.

For cryptocurrency investors around the world, these two points could be very important when it comes to how the market will perform in the near future. According to cryptosoho.com, Bitcoin sees a market volume of around $17 billion every day, while its nearest competitors, Ethereum and Tether, experience around $12 billion to $25 billion worth of movement. This might seem large, but it is still well below the numbers that were experienced in late 2021 when one BTC was worth nearly $70,000.

Paypal, X, And Crypto

The cryptocurrency market has been in a crypto winter for over a year now, with no end in sight. But just last month, PayPal breathed a bit of life into the market by introducing a fully regulated stablecoin known as PYUSD. The platform’s foray into the cryptocurrency market indicates how popular it perceives blockchain to be over the coming years – coming from a banking disrupter worth $63 billion, this is certain to welcome a few more investors onto the scene.

And now it looks as if X will do the same thing. Just recently, X chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, hinted that Musk was meeting with banks to propose an expansion into finance. Every sign out there indicates that Musk is still looking to realise his dream of the ultimate financial app, with cryptocurrency at the front and centre of its operations. This is even further exemplified by Musk’s denial of launching a new X-based crypto token. If X is looking to orientate itself around finances and crypto, that would suggest they will be implementing existing cryptocurrencies.

If this is the case, then crypto will undoubtedly thrive on it. When PayPal announced its integration of tokens such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, this was the biggest push for the market’s bull run that took Bitcoin to nearly $70,000. If Musk is truly using X to create a new financial competitor, then the winter of crypto might be close to being over.