From likes to trades: Why X sees an opportunity in crypto

​Social network X is preparing to take a step toward cryptocurrency trading, with former head of product Nikita Bier saying trading buttons will soon appear alongside token charts. But what happens when the platform where digital assets are discovered and discussed also becomes a gateway to executing trades?

For X, this is not a sudden pivot toward crypto. Back in the days of Jack Dorsey, Twitter — now X — became one of the industry's main platforms, where projects build communities, developers make announcements and traders react to market developments.

Now the company is adding financial tools to that information infrastructure.

In April, X launched an updated version of Cashtags, allowing users to select a specific stock or token, open its chart and view related posts. The feature also supports smart contract addresses, making it possible to identify a specific token precisely.

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X does not necessarily need to become a crypto exchange. Instead, the platform is shortening the path between receiving information and taking financial action. Rather than moving from a post to price data and then to an exchange, users could complete several of those steps within a single interface.

From discussing the market to hitting buy

For now, it is important not to overstate the announcement. Bier left his position as X's head of product in August and remains an adviser, while the company itself has not officially announced the launch of trading. The timing, list of supported assets and partners that would execute the trades remain unknown.

Bier previously clarified that the platform does not intend to become a broker or execute trades itself. The Canadian integration offers a possible model: clicking a ticker on X redirects the user to Wealthsimple, where the transaction is executed.

Wealthsimple itself confirms that trading takes place on its platform and that account information is not shared with Elon Musk's company.

Even this model, however, significantly changes the role of the social network. A user discovers an asset through a post, sees the community's reaction, checks the chart and gets a direct route to buying it.

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This is particularly significant for cryptocurrencies. Trading takes place around the clock, new tokens are constantly being launched, and a substantial share of project communication happens directly on social media. Cashtags can even link a post to the smart contract address of a newly issued token.

The crypto market has long lived inside X

Financial features arrived much later than the crypto community itself. The term Crypto Twitter has long been used to describe an ecosystem that brings together developers, project founders, exchanges, analysts and traders.

Under Jack Dorsey, that relationship began to turn into a product.

In 2021, Twitter added the ability to send Bitcoin via Lightning through its Tips feature, later adding support for Ethereum addresses. The company also experimented with NFT profile pictures and created a dedicated Twitter Crypto division.

After Elon Musk acquired the social network, the connection became even more visible. Musk himself has repeatedly demonstrated how quickly a post from a major account can turn into a market event, particularly in the case of Dogecoin.

Studies of Musk's crypto-related posts have found statistically significant reactions in both prices and trading volumes. In such cases, X was already functioning as part of the market infrastructure, even though the actual trade took place elsewhere.

Now the company has its first opportunity to monetize that role directly by channeling interest generated within the platform toward trading partners.

The potential scale is already notable. Just days after Cashtags launched, Bier estimated that the new feature had driven roughly $1 billion in trading volume. The company has not publicly disclosed the methodology behind that estimate.

When a post becomes part of the trade

For X, such a model could be attractive even without operating its own exchange. The platform can remain the point of customer acquisition and direct users to financial partners without handling asset custody or executing orders itself.

That is notably different from Musk's more radical ideas. In 2022, he considered moving Twitter onto a blockchain and charging users small DOGE fees for certain actions, but abandoned the concept because of speed, throughput and other limitations.

Instead, cryptocurrencies could become more deeply integrated into X through the opposite approach. Rather than moving the social network onto a blockchain, financial functions can be embedded into the existing centralized platform.

At the same time, this integration amplifies a problem Crypto Twitter has faced for years: the quality of information directly influences users' financial decisions. The closer the buy button is to a post, the less time users have to verify what they are seeing.

X's crypto community has extensive experience with fake accounts, automated spam and the promotion of questionable tokens. Bier himself has publicly discussed the problem of crypto bots and low-quality promotion.

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There is an even more striking example. In 2020, attackers gained access to the accounts of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Apple, Barack Obama and other prominent users and posted scam messages containing Bitcoin addresses. More than $100,000 was sent to those addresses.

At the time, victims still had to open a wallet and send the funds themselves. If financial actions are placed directly next to a post, the potential value of a compromised account or an artificially promoted token becomes much greater.

Support for smart contract addresses helps users identify the exact asset, but it does not answer whether that asset is trustworthy or who has an interest in promoting it. Combining information and trading therefore makes X more convenient for investors while also increasing the importance of the quality of its information environment.

Elon Musk's platform has influenced the crypto market for years without having its own trading infrastructure. If trading buttons do appear, the biggest change will not be the arrival of yet another place to buy tokens, but the reduction of the distance between an information impulse and a trade to almost a single screen.

For X, this could turn years of accumulated influence over the crypto community into a new financial business. For the market itself, the cost of that efficiency will depend on whether the platform can distinguish useful information from advertising, manipulation and fraud.