Elon Buys Twitter - what it means for the world of crypto

You've probably already seen this picture by now but here is Elon marching into Twitter's HQ.

This change in ownership is expected to have huge effects on the crypto space, starting with:

A Dogecoin Renaissance?

Dogecoin doubled in price over the month of October, and its all because of the man pictured above. Elon is a known fan of Dogecoin. Twitter has been making noises about integrating crypto wallets into the site. There were also leaked messages between Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey where they discussed the idea of a decentralised social network where users pay a tiny fee for each message. Crucially, Musk has also talked about using Dogecoin for payments specifically. This is what led to a surge in the price of Dogecoin. If Twitter were to integrate Dogecoin payments, Dogecoin would gain 200 million users overnight (and it would finally have a proper use case).

Binance getting Involved

Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, has created a whole new team to explore "ways that blockchain and crypto could be helpful to Twitter". One likely area of focus will be to see if there are any on-chain solutions to the bot problem on Twitter. One of the big talk points in the lead-up to Musk buying Twitter was the fact that a huge number of Twitter accounts are in fact fake accounts generated by bots. Binance clearly believes that the change in ownership will be a catalyst for further integration of web3 tools at Twitter.

The race for a decentralised social network

Musk originally said that he was thinking of putting Twitter on-chain and making it open source. He has since gone back on this by saying: "Blockchain Twitter isn’t possible. The bandwidth and latency requirements cannot be supported by a peer-to-peer network, unless those ‘peers’ are absolutely gigantic, thus defeating the purpose of a decentralised network".

So maybe a decentralised Twitter is not happening any time soon. But there are still many people chasing this dream, including Twitter's original founder Jack Dorsey. He is building a decentralised social network called Bluesky. Although importantly, Bluesky does not actually use blockchain technology. Jack Dorsey has been an outspoken critic of web3 and questions how "decentralised" some of the biggest protocols actually are.

The bottom line

Twitter has almost 400 million users globally and over 200 million daily active users. Any crypto adoption by Twitter, even small changes, could have a big effect on the whole space.