Twitter’s new owner is already making Web3 noise

Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter last week, we at Incrypto have been reading between the 280 characters of his every tweet like Swifties trying to guess new song titles.

And it’s not just us. On Sunday, crypto fans launched into a comment frenzy after Musk tweeted a legendary cartoon known as “CryptoDickbutt” that inspired a collection of NFTs. (Yep, that’s its real name.) And much was made of his tweet reply to a video about a blue whale…since a “whale” is someone who owns a significant amount of crypto.

Plus, Musk frequently responds to Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus’s tweets and has a long-term relationship with the volatile meme coin. The meme coin’s price doubled on the news that Musk had officially sealed the Twitter deal last week, and the shiba inu coin also surged by association.

In sum, crypto investors feel a jolt of enthusiasm about Twitter’s Web3 future under its new leadership, especially with Musk bringing in Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) crypto investor Sriram Krishnan. That’s saying a lot considering Twitter’s old leadership had already rolled out in-platform NFTs, bitcoin and ether tipping, crypto payment options using stablecoins, hexagonal NFT profile pictures, and *takes a breath* most recently, a new type of NFT-showcasing post.

But Musk seems more into infrastructure than frills

In fact, Musk called NFT profile pics “annoying.” In his Twitterverse, it seems there are two main ways crypto may be involved:

1) Blockchain technology: Crypto exchange Binance invested $500 million into Musk’s buyout of Twitter and is creating a team to use blockchain to help crack down on bots on the platform. Musk also said in texts released by a court last month that Twitter could charge users to register messages on blockchains to aid his bot culling.

2) Payments: In an investor presentation uncovered by the NYT, Musk—who cofounded PayPal back in the day—projected that Twitter would make $1.3 billion in revenue from payments by 2028. Pair that with his teasing of Twitter accepting dogecoin as payment for Twitter Blue, and you have a recipe for a social media platform running (in part) on crypto payments.

But don’t expect Twitter to make the jump from Web2 to Web3 overnight…or at all. While cryptocurrency analysts told us that Musk could be a powerful crypto evangelist in his new gig as Chief Twit, Nik Bhatia, a University of Southern California prof and author of Layered Money, told Incrypto that “[i]t’s very hard to project what Elon is going to come in and do.” Retweet.—JW