A disappointing Elon Musk unveiled on Tuesday its collaboration with Visa to manage peer-to-peer payment transactions for its forthcoming X Money feature.
The platform plans to utilize Visa Direct, Visa's real-time money transfer service, to deposit funds into the X wallet. It will also enable users to link a debit card for making payments to others and facilitate transferring funds back to their bank accounts.
And immediately everyone was happy to announce: "X Money will do to Banks, what Tesla did to legacy auto".
But forgetting Musk's promises to integrate decentralized payments on the blockchain network into his social platform: many expected him to adopt Dogecoin as a payment method, others Stellar XLM, some even Ripple XRP, if not even Bitcoin on the lightning network. And instead, he associates himself with VISA, a bastion of the old centralized finance.
Strange, given that Musk has become the new Crypto Jesus, and prophet of decentralized finance, alongside the new president Trump who wants to make the United States the first 100% crypto friendly nation in the world.
Stranger still, none of us mere mortals, no influencer or freelance journalist has criticized this move. Musk promises crypto but uses the old financial systems for his companies. No criticism, everyone is happy.
And here then I saw the social inLeo in another light. And I saw it as a true competitor to the giant X.
I think now is the time to give a very strong push forward and make inLeo known throughout the world as a true decentralized social network, with its decentralized crypto currency (LEO) used both as a reward system and as a decentralized and uncensorable means of payment.
There are many social networks that have tried in the past to compete with giants like X. Since its launch in 2006, many attempts have been made to dislodge X from its top spot, with more recent attempts focusing on freer speech and less moderation. These include Gab, Parler, Mastodon, and Truth Social, though these attempts have tended to become topic havens for interest groups that feel marginalized or censored in mainstream spaces.
However, in particular I would like to focus on decentralized social media based on the blockchain.
I remember for example BitClout which later became DeSo (Decentralized Social), which was even supported and advertised by Coinbase as "the first layer-1 blockchain built from the ground up to decentralize social media and scale storage-heavy apps to billions of users", but which then turned out to be a scam that only brought money into the pockets of its creator, Nader Al-Naji, who spent over $7 million of DeSo funds on personal expenses, including renting a mansion in Beverly Hills and giving lavish cash gifts to family members.
I also remeber Twetch, one of the most prominent and longest-running social built on the BSV blockchain, around since 2018, and closed after six-year lifespan, unable to survive in an industry dominated by a single, monolithic competitor, X, formerly Twitter. Twetch always looked a lot like X on the surface, but its most compelling features were micropayments and blockchain records of all posts. Users made small payments to follow, like, or re-post others and received them for interactions with their material. This presented social media with an economic model far superior (in theory) to the advertising and data-harvesting income model for other platforms. These features were made possible by Bitcoin and later BSV technology, though only where a blockchain network remained fast, scalable, and affordable to transact on.
X isn’t exactly beloved by its user base and has outraged all positions on the ideological spectrum at some point or another with its moderation policies, but it continues to dominate the short-post market, thanks to the massive audience it provides.
I hope that now, Elon Musk's questionable move to choose centralized finance gives a powerful boost to the developers of the inLeo platform so that it can compete on equal terms with X.
Because inLeo is no less than other platforms that have tried to compete with X but have failed, indeed it has all the prerequisites to make the quantum leap, make itself known "at the top", for example by Coinbase and others, and succeed where others have failed.