Elon Musk said late Tuesday that payments features in the social app X will go live next month.
The feature, called X Money, turns X into a fintech app with peer-to-peer transfers, bank deposits, a debit card and cash back.
The platform is licensed in more than 40 US states through subsidiary X Payments and has Visa as its account funding partner.
Dogecoin rose as much as 8%, before reversing the gains, following the announcement despite it containing no reference to cryptocurrencies. It hit almost $0.10 over the past day before settling down around $0.093, making it the best-performing major crypto over both 24-hour and seven-day periods.
The thoughtful move reflects a pattern that has repeated itself several times since 2021. Musk says something about X payments and DOGE sparks speculation that he will integrate it.
Musk has called dogecoin his “favorite cryptocurrency” and Tesla accepted DOGE as a commodity in 2022. But X Money, as described, is a purely fiat product, with peer-to-peer transfers, bank linkage, and debit card. That’s closer to Venmo with a social media app attached, not a crypto wallet.
As such, X head of product Nikita Bier said in February that cryptocurrency trading tools would come to X via Smart Cashtags, but clarified that the platform would not execute trades or act as a brokerage.
It would provide data and links that would redirect users to the exchanges. Musk recently reposted a third-party forecast for X Money’s future features that included “crypto integration,” but the company hasn’t confirmed anything.
The most interesting question for crypto markets is not whether to add DOGE. It is the 6% yield.
The six percent balance within a social media app used by hundreds of millions of people is higher than virtually all U.S. savings accounts and competitive with money market funds. Whether it is subsidized by
The timing clashes with Congress’s fight over the CLARITY Act, which would set rules for yielding stablecoin products.
The Senate Banking Committee is targeting mid-to-late March for the margin. The central policy question is whether non-banking platforms should be allowed to offer consumers deposit-like returns.
X Money is not a stablecoin product, but it addresses exactly the same consumer demand – people looking for better returns than what their bank offers – through a different regulatory path.
If X Money launches at scale with a 6% APY before the CLARITY Act is passed, it makes for an uncomfortable comparison. A fintech fiat product within a social media app can offer returns that stablecoin crypto products are excluding by law.
