TeslaTSLA billionaire and X owner Elon Musk has a habit of causing wild swings for the bitcoin price and other major cryptocurrencies (with Musk lobbing a grenade into the crypto market earlier this month).
The bitcoin price has swung wildly over the last few months as economic and regulatory pressures mount—though traders are now braced for a $15.5 trillion September Wall Street earthquake.
Now, after a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) insider has warned bitcoin and crypto buyers to beware of Binance, a leak has suggested Musk could turn X (Twitter) into an “updated version of PayPalPYPL.”
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Musk “continues to have conversations [with] top Wall Street executives on [the] future of X,” Fox Business News correspondent Charles Gasparino, posted to X.
“Seems to be settling, they tell me, on a new-fangled payment system, [an] updated version of PayPal. It will offer low transaction costs (as opposed to credit cards) and monetize user info.”
Earlier this month, media reports denied by Musk suggested X could add a trading platform built inside the app as part of a plan to turn the app into a financial-data giant, with Musk going on to say X will never launch a cryptocurrency of its own to rival bitcoin, ethereum, XRPXRP or Musk’s “fave” cryptocurrency dogecoin.
PayPal, the payments giant Musk’s X.com created when it merged with Confinity in March 2000, earlier this month launched a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin PYUSD, hoping to succeed where Meta, then Facebook, failed with its own libra-turned-diem stablecoin.
PayPal’s support for bitcoin and crypto in late 2020 helped kick off the latest bitcoin price bull run that catapulted bitcoin to almost $70,000.
“We saw PayPal introduce its stablecoin—that also acts as a stamp of approval,” Gavin Michael, the chief executive of Intercontinental Exchange-owned bitcoin custody company Bakkt, said in emailed comments.
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Michael called BlackRock’s plans to create a long-awaited U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) a “stamp of apporval” as well. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, triggered a resurgence of Wall Street interest in bitcoin and crypto when it filed for a spot bitcoin ETF in June.
“We’re starting to see people settling transactions over stablecoins, whether they’re minted on a private or public blockchain and we like that as well because what it’s starting to show is that the technology itself is making conventional financial services better,” Michael said.
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