Twitter Applies to Become a Money Service Business – What Will It Mean For Crypto Prices

The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk has not been a smooth process. Several high-profile users have threatened to leave the platform. However, Musk remains undeterred and is already rolling out changes on the platform. One of these changes is the pursuit of becoming a payment processor.

Twitter to become a money service business

A filing with the US Treasury Department Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) shows that Twitter plans to become a money service business. The filing made on November 4 says that Twitter wants to offer money services within the United States and other countries.

According to FinCEN, a money transmitter, which is what Twitter intends to branch into, is an individual or an organization offering money transmission services or a party that transfers funds.

It is not the first time that Musk is moving toward the digital money space. In 1999, Musk was behind creating an online bank known as X.com, which was later rebranded into PayPal in 2000.

The plans of Twitter to diversify into the payment service sector had earlier been hinted at by the chief strategy officer at Binance, Patrick Hillman. Binance invested $500 million in the Twitter acquisition deal.

While speaking in an interview with CoinDesk, Hillman said that Binance wanted to support Twitter’s growth and innovation by checking whether the social media platform could be used as a payment service supporting micro-transactions.

Dogecoin rally cools off

After Musk completed the Twitter acquisition deal, the largest meme coin by market capitalization, Dogecoin, made a massive rally. The meme coin was gaining amid speculations that Musk would adopt DOGE payments on Twitter.

Musk is a big supporter of Dogecoin. The billionaire has already supported DOGE payments in some companies, such as Tesla and SpaceX. If Dogecoin payments are rolled out on Twitter, it could trigger notable gains for the meme coin, given that the crypto community on Twitter is big.

At the time of writing, DOGE was trading at $0.088 after gaining around 3% in the last 24 hours. The coin is now down 27% over the past week amid a notable downtrend in the broader market caused by the insolvency of the FTX exchange. Despite the notable decline, DOGE is still a top-ten cryptocurrency.

Last month, reports said that Musk was working on creating a “wallet prototype” supporting deposits and withdrawals of different cryptocurrencies. Moreover, the Binance exchange announced launching the Bluebird index comprising DOGE, BNB, and MASK, raising hopes that DOGE payments would indeed be integrated on Twitter.

However, the hopes of DOGE payments are fading, given that the process could take a while. Reports said that Twitter had put plans to launch a crypto wallet on hold. Musk has yet to announce whether Dogecoin will be among the payments accepted for the newly-launched $8 fee for Twitter verification.

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