Twitter is going big on crypto starting today. Twitter is making two big updates that will make cryptocurrency integral to its product, with more likely to come. Twitter Tipping is expanding globally today to everyone on Apple’s iOS, and there will now be an option to tip in Bitcoin. Second, Twitter will…
Twitter is going crypto starting today.
Twitter is making two big updates that will make cryptocurrency integral to its product, with more likely to come. Twitter Tipping is expanding globally today to everyone on Apple’s iOS, and there will now be an option to tip in Bitcoin. Second, Twitter will create a way for its users to verify that he or she owns the NFT they use for their profile picture.
“Twitter’s purpose is to serve the public conversation,” Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter’s head of consumer products, said today during a video press conference. “We’re focusing on turning followers into fans and fans into funds.”
Twitter issued advice in Maybut the number of people who can use it has been limited. Everyone will be able to send and receive tips starting today on iOS, though the team plans to roll out to Android soon.
Bitcoin tip
Most importantly, there will be an opportunity to tip creators in Bitcoin.
“There are two billion people around the world who don’t use traditional banking services,” said Esther Crawford, who leads creator monetization at Twitter. “Cryptocurrency, like Twitter, works without global barriers, so we’re excited to incorporate that into our products.”
Tipping works through partnerships with third-party apps, and Twitter does not receive any tips. Once tips are enabled, creators can specify how they want to receive tips, so they will need to specify a third-party service that supports Bitcoin in order for a fan to be able to tip in Bitcoin.
When an external application is used, it will lead to some kind of open or web-based experience that is outside of Twitter’s control. That said, Crawford said Twitter will also support the Lightning Network for tips. The Lightning Network is a second layer on Bitcoin that allows for faster and cheaper transactions.
Lightning Bill
Lightning will be supported through an integration with the Strike app. The strike was made by Zap, Inc., the company founded by Jack Mallers, who announced El Salvador’s intention to adopt Bitcoin as an official means of payment earlier this year.
“It’s a little more integrated,” Crawford explained. Tips using Lightning will generate a Lightning invoice, and then when the payment is complete, the creator can see a notification and provide a personalized response, if desired, she explained.
“There is this great opportunity for us to choose global, barrier-free solutions, and bitcoin represents one of the best options,” Crawford said.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is also the CEO of payments company Square, which has already integrated Bitcoin into its Cash app. Dorsey is known to be a big fan of Bitcoin and an investor in Lightning Labs. He predicted Twitter’s move to incorporate Bitcoin earlier this year.
This is likely not the end of the road for Bitcoin on Twitter.
Features of making money
“There’s a lot of internal excitement and dialogue about how we can integrate cryptocurrency into different monetization features,” Crawford said. There was no news of the incorporation of any other cryptocurrency today.
When Dorsey sold his first tweet for almost $3 million, something seemed to click.
Twitter has been supportive of the decentralized web for some time, with Dorsey announcing an initiative to decentralize Twitter in 2019, called Blue Sky.
“We want to help creators participate in an emerging decentralized internet right on Twitter,” said Crawford.
The one update they had on that front should be of great interest to many who have gotten into crypto with NFTs.
Yacht Club Mania
Twitter is creating a way to verify that the NFT someone uses for their profile picture is the one they actually own. It’s developing a user-friendly way to prove this ownership with a cryptocurrency wallet, and that proof will somehow appear in the profile image, perhaps with a badge or a modified form for the avatar.
“We’re still figuring out what the visual opportunity looks like,” Crawford said.
Changing a user’s Twitter avatar to an image of an NFT they owned became so big this summer that The New Yorker actually covered it at the height of the Bored Apes Yacht Club craze. The ability to seamlessly verify that a Twitter user’s ownership of that NFT is real is likely to make such NFTs even more in demand.
A bored monkey
Crawford said they are also working on ways to highlight metadata about the NFT, as well as information about its history.
The exact timeline for the NFT authentication feature was not announced. To some extent, Twitter teased its interest in NFTs this summer when it released a few of its own.
There’s more to come for crypto on Twitter.
“It’s still early days for digital currencies, but we think that’s the future, so we’re moving in that direction by adding those features,” Crawford said.
