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The payments industry is heading into the new year with a significant question mark hanging over its head: What does it mean that the massive social network X is apparently planning to launch a payments network?
Little is known so far about the initiative. A New Year’s Eve post on X, formerly Twitter, by chief executive Linda Yaccarino, though brief, apparently refers to several initiatives the company is looking to introduce in 2025. These include X TV and Grok, the company’s chatbot, as well as X Money. “X will connect you in ways you never thought possible,” she says in the post. X could not be reached for comment.
Though brief, the reference to “X Money” is seen by some observers as a teaser for a service that is likely to include enabling X users to send and receive payments, particularly transfers involving cryptocurrency. “It will certainly be some new rails for crypto,” notes Cliff Gray of Gray Consulting Ventures LLC. The aim, indeed, could be to make exchanging digital currency for merchandise a “more friendly” process than it has been, and thus widen the market for transactions involving Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
An account on X, called Xmoney, has apparently been live for a year and has attracted more than 145,000 followers, according to its X account. Globally, X has more than 400 million users, according to numbers compiled by Statista. Its user base grew about 3.4% in 2024, according to the numbers.
That could make X an attractive platform for payments, as well as a potential bottom-line booster, observes say. “This is another source of revenue,” notes Thad Peterson, strategic advisor at the payments advisory Datos-Insights
“It’s such a pervasive platform, most people have an account,” says Gray. “They could easily introduce a closed-loop solution. It could go any number of ways.” PayPal is an example of a large, and popular, closed-loop payments platform. Though Gray says X has the potential to challenge PayPal, this outcome will be a long time coming as the social network is still developing its transactional capabilities.
Still, rival social networks like BlueSky have attracted many users, some of them former X devotees, in recent years, Gray points out, lending urgency to the need at the network to expand into services such as payments. That could make digital-currency payments especially important for X, he says, as a means to appeal to users of cryptocurrency, particularly as payments platforms increasingly move toward real-time transactions.
