Crypto Twitter Starts Getting Elon's Attention

Crypto Twitter has had a fairly complicated relationship with the platform over the years. Back in January, I wrote how "The more X can make Crypto Twitter feel like it isn't second-class, the more CT will feel at home again."

Fast forward to this week, and the platform just made its latest push here with the rollout of revamped Cashtags, allowing users to browse live price charts and related posts directly in their feeds for crypto + stocks.

The launch is currently limited to iPhone users in Canada and the U.S.

And while, for now, Cashtags are just a discovery tool for Americans, Canadian users can try the X integration with Wealthsimple to trade from Cashtag pages within X. X head of product (and Solana advisor) Nikita Bier teased this as a "small preview of what's to come."

Elon Musk has long been promising the transformation of X into an everything app that taps a slew of financialized features. The Cashtags rollout is deliberately narrow out of the gate, but Bier's "just a preview" framing is an invitation to think about where this feature should go.

Crypto Twitter can be a bit of a mess, and I don't envy the prospect of trying to please everyone across ecosystem and creed, but I've got some ideas.

For example, it'd be nice to have:

• Fairer liquidity navigation: Right now, it seems Cashtags are prioritizing the Solana instances of multi-chain tokens. As we said, Bier is an advisor to Solana so there's no mystery why, but it'd really be useful to be able to sort and browse these sorts of tokens by their liquidity so you can surface the best swap points.

• Expanded DEX support: The Wealthsimple integration for in-feed trading is certainly a cool starting point, but to win hardcore crypto traders over and make Cashtags a popular CT utility, adding support for in-feed swaps via decentralized exchanges would be a no-brainer. Though if I had to guess, X's devs are likely already working on this.
• Optional wallet connectivity: We know X Money is debuting later this month, but its scope remains to be seen. Will the app have a native crypto wallet, or allow you to import existing ones? Only time will tell, but if not, offering an alternative so that you can connect your own self-custodial wallets to X and trade Cashtags like that would be good. This would depend on DEX support, which seems inevitable.
• More signal tools: Being able to customize price alerts is another low-hanging option possible around Cashtags, but social signal alerts also have lots of potential. Imagine being able to set up copytrade triggers or even just basic notifications depending on if certain posting thresholds are met around a given Cashtag. This definitely would be a hit for power users.

Crypto Twitter has always treated X as home base even when the platform didn't fully reciprocate. Despite more decentralized or crypto-native offerings elsewhere, most of us just can't quit obsessively checking the platform. In this light, Cashtags are a small but promising sign that this dynamic is changing for the better.

X has a huge opportunity to embrace crypto more deeply and punch up asset discovery and tap crypto rails for more seamless in-app trading. It's a match that makes sense and taps into the vision that Elon Musk has been pushing for years.

Nikita, this is a great start, now let's keep it going!