Elon Musk announced that XChat is going to be added to X. This will replace the existing DM feature that is presently available to premium users.
Since purchasing Twitter in 2022, Musk has espoused the idea of X becoming "the everything app". He is modeling it after the popular Chinese application, WeChat. The idea is to integrate social media, commerce, and financial all in one.
Earlier this year, the CEO of X, Linda Yaccarino, announced that X would roll out its payment system. This is being called XMoney. The company has secured licenses from most states in the US. This authorizes the company to transfer funds on behalf of people in those states.
As of now, there is still no word of crypto integration. My guess is that, on this end, X will wait for regulatory clarity. With two bills pending in Congress, it is of benefit to wait. A few months will not set anything back.
If I had to forecast, I think that X ultimately brings out its own stablecoin. That will facilitate the transactions. Nothing was stated by the company on this end but, since the bill prohibits publicly traded, non-financial corporations from doing this, X can get a leg up on Meta and Google.
In the meantime, we can entertain the idea of XChat.
The Everything App: XChat Being Added To X
The pending addition of XChat to the X platform will be a major step forward. It appears this is going to mimic the capabilities of something like Signal.
Elon Musk has introduced XChat, a new messaging feature, on his platform X (formerly Twitter). With this latest addition, Musk is taking another big step toward turning X into an all-in-one platform for daily use. In a post, Musk shared that XChat offers end-to-end encryption, disappearing messages and support for sending any type of file. Additionally, you can do audio and video calls across all platforms without needing a phone number.
There was some confusion as Musk mentioned Bitcoin-like encryption. That threw people since it does not seem that Bitcoin has encryption that is novel. What makes Bitcoin different is the distributed nature of the ledger, with unrelated nodes all keeping the ledger updated.
On this, there is no way X is setting up a decentralized node system to run XChat. Perhaps there is a new encryption type developed but it seems this is more of a marketing pitch.
That aside, this will offer a lot to the platform. Musk is operating from the standpoint of having all the features rolled into one platform. Even Meta has things siloed between its different applications.
More Than Social Media
Remember when the media was promoting Bluesky as the next great thing. It was laughable how desperate they were to keep attacking Musk. Many felt that Bluesky would become the X killer.
Since that time, Bluesky has leveled out. The mistake people make is to think about social media as a destination. Bluesky, or any other platform, is doomed to fail if it operates simply as a social media application.
Those days are dead.
Instead, we are looking at platforms that are multi-featured. Not only are we seeing the merging of commerce, financial, and social media, AI is playing an ever larger role. It just so happens, like Google and Meta, X has its own LLM.
Then we have banking.
For the moment, things are a bit uncertain. The lobbyists for the banks did a good job getting regulatory protection. However, the last 20 years showed us that the banks cannot stand up to FinTech.
At some point, the larger technology players will get into finance. The path is blurred at the moment until regulatory clarity is provided. Once that happens, the Silicon Valley giants will figure out a way to get around them.
Exploiting loopholes is the specialty of their highly paid legal teams.
If digital wallets become the foundation of finance, then we are looking at the walled systems the banks operate being threatened. Of course, adding a wallet system to a digital platform is child's play for these tech giants.
XChat will likely offer commercial activities. This means the money transfer system will be integrated.
The idea is to have it all build upon itself.