Elon Musk plans to widely expand crypto engagement on Twitter. At least, leaked company documents tell it.
Along with Reddit, Twitter is one of the most important platforms for the crypto community.
The lion’s share of main market news appears there. And guys like Vitalik Buterin like to troll their subscribers with funny tweets, obviously.
The Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey liked crypto so much that he even dropped his company for another digital payments project Block. And it’s going quite successful to date.
Now Twitter is passing to another crypto-interested billionaire Elon Musk, who also wants to expand community engagements in tokenized economics.
Some leaked documents now reveal Musk’s plans on crypto within Twitter. And here’s a bit of interesting in it.
Make Twitter great again
According to the leaked Q&A session with its employees, Tesla and SpaceX CEO now plan to make crypto payments a ‘critical area’ for Twitter.
This includes tackling the crypto scams on the social media platform, maximizing the usefulness of the platform, and adding digital currencies.
“Money is fundamentally digital at this point. It would make sense to integrate payments into Twitter so that it’s easy to send money back and forth,” Musk said.
He also highlights that crypto payments should be one of the three critical areas for Twitter, along with news and entertainment. In his words, this would make the service ‘so compelling that you can’t live without it and that everyone wants to use it.
If you are familiar with Chinese mega social network WeChat – Twitter soon can become something like this. The WeChat app allows people to make payments, hail a ride, or even order food delivery.
Any private seller on Chinese streets has his own WeChat QR-code printed, so you can pay for any goods or services in a flash.
Inspired by WeChat, Twitter could soon become the real crypto payment social network. If new Musk’s team would succeed to do it properly.
What about crypto scams?
Being a shelter for thousands of scammers, Twitter also made a lot of confiding users lose their digital assets.
One of the popular scamming schemes is celebs’ impersonation and asking for some tokens in exchange for more tokens. And Elon Musk person is one of the most used by scammers to deceive his fans.
Moreover, fraudsters often hijack verified and unverified accounts on Twitter to impersonate popular NFT projects, including Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), Azukis, MoonBirds, and OkayBears.
Driving users to phishing sites, hackers can steal users’ crypto assets, including artists’ NFTs.
“The premise is simple. You tweet with popular keywords like #NFT, #NFT community, #crypto, etc. There’s always some bot that monitors these tweets and quickly retweets your tweet—after which the scam account shares a malicious link as a free giveaway,” NFT enthusiast Kaushal V wrote.
Musk says the situation with scams is going better, but there’s still a fair bit of that. He added that there are not necessarily bots on the platform, but one person can operate hundreds of accounts and try to make them look like individuals.
“In order for people to have trust in Twitter, I think it’s extremely important that there be transparency. The platform’s code should be made open-source so that people can critique it, improve it, identify bugs, potentially, or bias,” the new Twitter owner thinks.
Another solution for fake accounts on Twitter is was verification through the Twitter Blue subscription payment service. Musk also announced that Twitter Blue subscriptions could be paid in his favorite cryptocurrency Dogecoin.
Bots and fake accounts were one of the main problems for Musk’s Twitter acquisition. Recently he said that his $43 billion purchase ‘cannot move forward until Twitter provides information on how many fake accounts exist on the platform.
Is Twitter really going crypto?
Twitter fans should remember that Musk’s idea isn’t the first in its kind: the platform has already added Bitcoin tipping in 2021.
That year Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also unveiled Twitter Crypto – a business unit focused on developing the social network’s strategy for cryptocurrency, blockchains, and Web3.
Besides Bitcoin integration, Twitter even went on to incorporate Ethereum functionality and tried out a new program from payments processor Stripe that allowed USD payments through the Polygon network.
Earlier in June Musk said that there is a possibility to integrate the Logic crypto payments platform into Twitter to make digital assets’ transactions accessible.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao supported the new crypto Twitter idea and said that his exchange is prepared for everything. “He’s leading, we’re following. If he goes through with the deal, we’re committed. If he doesn’t, then I think we’re off,” Zhao commented.
During the last year, Twitter stocks have fallen nearly twice, from $70 to $35.
But after the news about Musk’s purchase of the platform in April, Twitter stocks abruptly surge to $50, making the new owner the richest man on Earth.
Do you want Twitter to become more crypto-friendly? Me too.
So let’s just look through this saga.
Sources: Decrypt, IndianExpress, CryptoPotato, Coindesk