When the world’s richest man gives the bird to the Twitter logo and replaces it with an X, it shouldn’t really have much of an impact on the world of cryptocurrency. But when that man is self-proclaimed ‘expert on everything’, Elon Musk, who famously enjoyed a stint as the unofficial CEO of Dogecoin, the normal rules tend to fall by the wayside.
On Sunday, Musk announced that he was rebranding the Twitter social media network as X, claiming that, “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live worldwide tomorrow.” True to his word, by the following day, the (ex-)Twitter headquarters was lit up with the new logo, taking the form of a vaguely art-deco letter X.
The Twitter X website was also quickly updated, tweets will now be refered to as Xs (yes really), and Musk will continue his quest to turn X into the ‘innovative’ everything-app that he hopes will achieve the same success as the mega-apps that have become ubiquitous in a number of Asian countries.
Apps like China’s WeChat, India’s PayTM and Indonesia’s GoTo GoJek offer social media and messaging elements along with shopping platforms and payment services, and have become essential to daily life for many citizens of those countries. As we Observed back in February, Musk has long had ambitions to add payment functionality to his social media network, although at the time cryptocurrency seemed to be more of an afterthought.
With the Twitter rebrand, however, talk of crypto payments being enabled through the platform has once more come to the fore, with Dogecoin fanboys leading the chant. The reason for all the excitement is that troll-meister general, Musk, has updated the location field of his X profile to simply show the new X logo followed by the dogecoin Ð.
Nothing more concrete than that has been said or even alluded to, but the price of doge has jumped 10% in a day on the news.
Musk has explained his preference for Dogecoin to the Wall Street Journal, by saying, “Dogecoin is my favorite cryptocurrency because it has the best humor and has dogs.” It is unclear whether he has any greater depth of knowledge than that regarding either dogecoin or any other cryptocurrency.
Dogecoin aside, a whole rack of random tokens has also received a boost in interest thanks to the rebrand. According to an article from CoinDesk, both existing tokens with vaguely X-related names and a host of opportunistic newly-minted tokens have ridden the wave of soaring prices.
One token reportedly pumped 1200% despite its project having closed down in May, while a new token co-opting Musk’s AI-X name saw a ten-fold price increase and a token called Deus X (after a pre-rebrand Musk tweet) jumped 2600%.
With Bitcoin and Ethereum experiencing extended periods of fairly low volatility those degenerate crypto bros and meme traders have to get their kicks somehow, we suppose. And we shall continue to Observe any future developments regarding dogecoin integration into X.