X Preps Crypto Trading Launch With Payments System Being Tested

X is reportedly set to allow users to trade socks and cryptocurrencies on their timelines.

That’s according to a report Sunday (Feb. 15) from Coindesk, which characterizes this development as part of the Elon Musk-headed social media platform’s widening push into the financial services space.

The new features will include “Smart Cashtags,” the report added, citing comments from Nikita Bier, X’s head of product. These will let users interact with ticker symbols in posts and carry out trades from the app.

As Coindesk noted, the announcement is happening as the company is preparing to launch an external beta of its payments system. Musk said X Money is being tested in-house and will be available to a limited user group within a month or two.

Musk has touted this as part of his vision for X becoming an “everything app,” allowing users to manage the bulk of their digital activity from one platform.

“You’ll be able to come to X and be able to transact your whole financial life on the platform,” former X CEO Linda Yaccarino told the Financial Times last year.

“And that’s whether I can pay you for the pizza that we shared last night or make an investment or a trade. So that’s the future.”

Meanwhile, PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote last month about the way AI-powered smart agents presented a challenge to super apps like Uber’s blend of food, groceries, mobility, payments and ride-hailing, as well offerings from banks and retailers.

“Across all of these models, the promise to the consumer was convenience. The benefit to the Super App operator was control,” Webster wrote. “Smart Agents break that compact.”

Agents can function across many merchants and platforms at the same time, with the organizing principle shifting from the platform’s ecosystem to the consumer’s intent. In a world governed by Super Apps, discovery is driven by the platform’s priorities, pricing transparency is limited, and the cost of switching is steep.

“In an agentic world, the agent’s job is to search broadly, compare honestly, and execute efficiently on the user’s behalf,” Webster wrote. “And it’s all guided by preferences and constraints set by the consumer, not by a single platform’s business model. That makes the Super Agent the new front door.”

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