Elon Musk is moving ahead with plans to bring payment functionality to Twitter, bringing another revenue stream to the struggling social media giant.
Though the technology will primarily be fiat-focused, it will be built so that crypto-functionality can be added in the future.
As reported by the Financial Times on Monday, Esther Crawford – Twitter’s Director of Product Management – has been working with a small team to map out the architecture for bringing payments to the platform. She is now the chief executive of Twitter Payments LLC.
The company has also been applying for state regulatory licenses across the U.S. to become eligible for the task, after registering with the U.S. Treasury as a payment processor in November. It hopes for complete US licensing within a year, and then expand internationally.
Musk has previously shown interest in bringing a suite of payment services to Twitter, ranging from peer-to-peer transactions to debit/ credit cards, creating an “everything app” that facilitates payments, commerce, and messaging. It would even allow people to buy products directly through the platform.
He’s even teased adding a Dogecoin payment option to Twitter – though no plans of the like have been confirmed yet.
According to The New York Times, an early Pitch Deck to investors last May showed that Musk planned to reign in $1.3 billion in payment revenue from Twitter by 2028. It represents another move by Musk to make Twitter more profitable, including placing verification behind a paywall and cutting thousands of employees from the business.
Before Musk took over, Twitter was already exploring both tipping and e-commerce features. Lightning-based Bitcoin tips were included in these updates, with Ether tips and NFT support following soon after.
Following the Financial Times’ reporting on the subject, Dogecoin briefly spiked to a daily high of $0.091, before dwindling back to $0.086 within a few hours.
Dogecoin has a history of reacting to Elon Musk-related news, whether or not it’s related to the specific meme coin. The digital currency surged 22% ahead of Musk’s takeover of Twitter, as he was moving into Twitter HQ.
Musk has previously suggested that Dogecoin is better than Bitcoin at handling transactions, due to its larger block size limit, and faster block speed. He also regularly interacts with the meme coin’s creator, Billy Markus, over Twitter.