Twitter 2.0 is up and Elon’s team is delivering impressive results. Now that a crypto-friendly Elon Musk is at the helm of the platform, blockchain enthusiasts can now hope for a better attitude towards their community.
The community can’t help but guess when the platform will accept crypto payments. Whether their optimism or expectation matches reality is another matter entirely.
Will Elon add crypto to Twitter?
In a tweet dated November 27, Elon made shared recent achievements and upgrades on Twitter 2.0 deliberately leaving the ‘Payments’ slide blank. The move left the community guessing with analysts suggesting big news in the near future.
Other achievements announced by the magnate included: recording new user signups and active minutes, daily active users at 250M, and dropping hate speech and impersonation reports. Twitter 2.0 upgrades included encrypted messages, long-form tweets, and a relaunch of ‘Blue verified’.
Elon has been a big proponent of digital assets, when his bid for the platform materialised the digital asset market cap surged. Other businesses by the magnate accept digital asset payments, and Tesla consumers can for instance pay for products in DogeCoin (DOGE).
Elon has long been a fan of DOGE. On May 8, at a TV comedy show on Twitter (Saturday Night Live) Elon branded himself the Dogefather, the mention saw DOGE surge and set an all-time high at $0.73. There have been multiple interactions on the platform of the same nature all impacting DOGE’s price.
When it comes to the platform however it is difficult to predict how digital asset payments will be applicable. Like most social media platforms, funding revolves around advertisements and subscriptions which arguably could be paid in digital assets.
DOGE for Twitter payments? If that were the case, the announcement will have a big impact on the meme token’s price
Earlier, in the Elon Vs Twitter trial (from an attempt to back out from the platform deal) strings of messages between Elon and other controversial figures were leaked. One in particular, with Steve Davis, president of Boring Company, explored the possibility of a blockchain Twitter. The mogul discussed the possibility of charging 0.1 DOGE per tweet/ retweet and moving the social platform to the blockchain. The idea was however far fetched and later deemed infeasible.
Crypto and social media platforms
Digital assets have not always had a smooth sailing relationship with social media platforms. Back in 2019, Facebook banned all forms of digital asset advertisements including their influencers. Youtube also made similar attempts. The platforms have however changed their stance on digital assets.
In October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, shared his vision of the Metaverse with stakeholders terming it the next chapter of the internet. He added that social media was their DNA and that they were “a company that builds technology to connect people, and the metaverse is the next frontier.”
While corporate-owned companies are taking chances on blockchain and digital assets, decentralized platforms are taking the technology head-on.
Users have widely shared their dissatisfaction with how corporate platforms deal with privacy, censorship, data theft, sharing, and user control, among other usage policies. These factors provide decentralized platforms with the leverage to attract new users by protecting them from censorship. While the platforms are often buggy and slow, what they offer is the peace of mind that a single motivated individual can still come in and disrupt the market.
Some decentralized platforms that could disrupt social media include Lens Protocol, Steemit, Only 1, and Mastodon. The platforms have all reported a growing user base in 2022.
