X’s new Cashtags feature has driven roughly $1 billion in trading volume, the company says. Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, said that figure is an estimate based on aggregated activity from the platform’s trading pilot and covers activity since the feature launched late Tuesday.
Cashtags, available now to iPhone users in the U.S. and Canada, lets people tag stock tickers or crypto smart contract addresses in posts. Tapping a tag opens live price charts and surfaces related posts, aiming to make market data more discoverable inside the social app.
The feature aligns with CEO Elon Musk’s push to expand X beyond social networking into financial services as part of an “everything app” strategy. X, which reports more than 550 million monthly users, has signaled ambitions in payments, e-commerce and other fintech offerings.
For Canadians, X has partnered with online brokerage Wealthsimple so that tapping a Cashtag for a stock or crypto can route users directly to Wealthsimple’s trading platform. As of now, no U.S. brokerage is integrated with the feature.
X is also developing a peer-to-peer payments product called X Money. Public details suggest the service could include yield-bearing accounts, a cashback debit card and other perks; an external beta demonstrated in early March showed a payments exchange between Elon Musk and actor William Shatner. It remains unclear how—or if—crypto payments will be folded into X Money.
To support payments ambitions, X has secured money transmitter licenses in more than 40 U.S. states and registered with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), steps that enable peer-to-peer payments on the platform.
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