The social media platform is building a payments system, and Musk wants crypto to be accommodated in the service.
Social media giant Twitter has begun applying for regulatory licences across the United States to prepare for entering a new revenue-making arena: the payments industry.
Elon Musk, Twitter’s CEO, previously expressed that he wants the social media platform to offer fintech service, peer-to-peer transactions, savings accounts, and debit cards.
While Musk says that he wants Twitter’s payments system to “first and foremost” be for fiat currencies, he wants the service to be able to add cryptocurrencies to its offerings.
Musk envisions building and planning for facilitating a payments system on Twitter to be part of a larger plan for an “everything app” – containing services such as messaging, payments, and commerce. Musk already has experience in online payments, having founded X.com, one of the first online banks in 1999, which soon became part of online payments titan PayPal.
Before Musk took over Twitter, the platform already had set up a subsidiary, Twitter Payments LLC back in August, and had experimented with payment features such as tipping creators, and eCommerce.
In bringing the Twitter Payments vision to reality, Musk appointed Esther Crawford, Twitter’s director of product management, to be chief executive of Twitter Payments.
According to two sources familiar with the matter, Crawford is currently leading efforts to map out what Twitter’s payments system would look like: including the design of the infrastructure required to collect, protect, and store user information.
Musk also envisions adding exploring more ways to directly reward creators, and for direct forms of eCommerce for goods and services within the Twitter Payments platform. In a pitch deck submitted to equity investors by Musk in May’s Twitter acquisition deal, Musk aims for Twitter to bring in approximately $1.3 billion in payments revenues by 2028.
On the regulatory front, Twitter has been making steady progress, registering with the US Treasury as a payments processor back in November. Twitter is currently in the process of applying for US state licensing that it would require to launch and perform its services in each jurisdiction.
Sources hope that the US licensing process will be completed within a year, and then will seek to expand to get regulatory approvals internationally.
Musk’s ambitions for Twitter comes after a time of increased scrutiny for not only electronic payments but also himself. After Musk laid off more than half of Twitter’s employees as his first steps into assuming leadership, many have feared that Twitter may lack adequate compliance staffing for it to keep it operating for the long run.
Meanwhile, things have been looking good for Dogecoin (DOGE) upon Musk’s announcement. The ‘memecoin’, adored by Musk, has spiked to its 24-hour high.
