Elon Musk, the owner of X (FKA Twitter), did not buy the platform to keep it as a “simple” social network. The entrepreneur wants to make it the “everything app” from which you can access multiple key services for your daily life. One of the services mentioned for a while is the X Money payment platform, and it seems that the company is also working on XChat for encrypted messaging.
X Money will arrive later this year, XChat encrypted messaging spotted
After some time without too much news related to it, the X payment service is beginning to take shape. Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, has announced Visa as the “first partner” that will drive the features of X Money. Plus, she confirmed that it “will debut later this year.” X Money will be a direct competitor to other fintech platforms, including PayPal, a service that Musk himself sold more than two decades ago to eBay.
X Money will offer all the features that are necessary for a modern payment platform to be competitive. Yaccarino’s post says the Visa partnership will enable “secure + instant funding to your X Wallet.” You’ll also be able to connect your debit card to use X Wallet as an intermediary platform for P2P payments. Of course, the platform will also let you transfer your funds to your bank account whenever you want. X Money will likely also make it easier to pay out monetization revenue to eligible users, as they could receive it directly into their “X wallets” for immediate use.
The Visa partnership is the “first of many big announcements about X Money this year,” X CEO said. Last year, she teased the arrival of X Money in a memo confirming that the company was working on offering banking and payment services to X users. Elon Musk even added that the company’s goal is for you to be able to run your “entire financial world” from a single app—X.
XChat option appeared for some, but it is not functional yet
The X dev team is also reportedly working on XChat, an encrypted messaging service. X user P4mui spotted a new “XChat” option in X’s sidebar, though it’s not yet functional. There are no details yet on whether XChat will also have a standalone app or if it will run off of the main one.
Elon’s vision for X borrows heavily from WeChat, a Chinese platform that does exactly what he wants. People in China use WeChat to communicate, pay, shop, and much more. Musk confirmed last year his intentions to launch an “X Mail” service to compete against Gmail and the like. Only time will tell if he can replicate that model in the West.
