Crypto Trading Isn’t Coming to Elon Musk's X (Yet), Says Product Head

In brief

• X head of product Nikita Bier clarified how Smart Cashtags will work.
• People will be able to trade assets in-app, but X will not facilitate trades.
• Musk said earlier this month that X Money is being beta tested internally.

Elon Musk’s X is eyeing crypto users with its introduction of “Smart Cashtags,” but the company isn’t getting its hands dirty with digital assets yet, according to Head of Product Nikita Bier. The feature, which was teased last month, will allow users to better specify which digital assets they post about, but it won’t facilitate users’ crypto trades, Bier clarified on Saturday. Since Musk’s acquisition of the platform in 2022, speculation has abounded that the Dogecoin fan could fold crypto into his “everything app.” However, Bier signaled Smart Cashtags’ rollout is limited within the company’s broader vision for combining social media with financial services.  “X is not handling trade execution or acting as a brokerage,” Bier wrote on X, in reference to the debut of Smart Cashtags. “[We’re] just building the financial data tools and links.”

 Although Smart Cashtags will work with stocks, the feature’s debut could have a more pronounced effect on Crypto Twitter where ticker symbols can overlap between digital assets, depending on which network they were issued on. With Smart Cashtags, users will be able to specify their ticker symbols down to a specific smart contract. In a separate post, Bier wrote on Saturday that the feature will be rolled out “in a couple of weeks,” and it will enable users to trade stocks and crypto “directly from [the app’s] timeline.” Previous descriptions of the feature entailed an in-app page, where prices, charts, price moves and related posts are shown in one place. That could make it easier for users to discover communities tied to specific digital assets, while alleviating ambiguity for users.

Musk signaled earlier this month that xAI’s long-awaited payments service is closer to being released. During an “All-Hands Meeting,” he said that “X Money” was being tested in beta form among employees, with plans to support a limited external beta in the coming months. “This is really intended to be the place where all the money is, the central source of all monetary transactions,” Musk said. “It’s really going to be a game changer.” The company has established a subsidiary called X Payments, which has secured money transmitter licenses in more than 40 U.S. states. Still, some lawmakers in New York have called on the company’s application to be denied, citing Musk’s cost-cutting efforts in government. The company hasn’t indicated that the product will use crypto. A year ago, former CEO Linda Yaccarino said that X Money would debut later this year in partnership with Visa and allow users to connect their debit cards to make peer-to-peer payments. She resigned in July.