After Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in 2022, it has become abundantly evident that the billionaire entrepreneur has some major goals in mind for the micro-blogging platform. Following Musk’s decision to disclose slides from his Twitter company talk from November 2022–which uncovered plans for what the 51-year-old entrepreneur termed as “Twitter 2.0: The Everything App”– there has been intense speculation about the platform’s future.
Elon’s Push For Payments
Quite recently, news broke that the Tesla CEO has been pushing the idea of a “Twitter Payments” feature where the social media company has already begun applications for state licenses in the United States. This comes as an effort to generate additional revenue streams outside the advertising category. Although hopes were high of crypto being incorporated into the so-called payments feature, but to everyone’s dismay, it was left out. The Dogecoin community was particularly affected to a greater extent than others due to Elon’s well-known affection for the cryptocurrency project.
Implementing cryptocurrencies on the platform for a social network with a global audience like Twitter might be a game-changing move toward making it “the everything app.” Twitter could develop into an advertising behemoth with a payment system that is as effective as Google or PayPal on a global scale, starting with the implementation of one-click purchases for tagged products in posts and ending with the formation of an embedded crypto wallet to pay for physical or digital items like NFTs.
Therefore, it begs the question — what if Elon actually did incorporate DOGE into Twitter’s new payment system? Let’s find out!
DOGE The Rightful Candidate?
Elon Musk warned that Twitter “needs to make money somehow” after the firm’s new owner disclosed plans for a premium verification service on the network. And, despite the fact that Musk’s obsession with the meme-based cryptocurrency Dogecoin has been well-reported for a considerable amount of time, the history of the coin makes it a good contender to meet the requirements for a virtual currency that can be accepted for digital payments on Twitter.
The fact that there are approximately 138 billion Dogecoins presently in circulation and the value being not so high, the flagship crypto comes out as a strong contender for the role of a native currency on platforms like Twitter. Not only that, the DOGE token is already being used by many as means of a tipping system inside Twitter and other platforms like Reddit. As a result of this, it has demonstrated some exploratory use cases when considered to be utilized as online money. However, the volatility that comes with it–not just for DOGE but for all cryptocurrencies in general–is the only thing preventing it from going mainstream.
There have been a few proposed solutions by businesses that are focused on blockchain development, and one of them involves locking the value of the token for a specific amount of time. This helps to reduce volatility and makes it possible for anyone to effortlessly transact using cryptocurrencies. Now, how exactly it will be implemented for DOGE & Twitter, is something that is best left up to the tech entrepreneur to figure out.
However, the most important thing to keep in mind is, it’s feasible. And, even though Elon has planned the upcoming Twitter Payments to release with fiat currency first, he hasn’t been shy about claiming crypto to be next. His repeated public endorsement of the dog-themed memecoin makes it the most viable option for crypto-based payments in the near future.
