Over a month ago, on April 13th, eToro announced that it partnered with Twitter. In this marriage of the super social networks, one for trading and one for microblogging, Twitter would enable users to trade stocks and other assets from eToro.

Specifically, this means that Twitter users could search for Cashtags, see the asset’s quote price, and then move to eToro if they want to trade. The collection of these ramp-off Cashtags will keep expanding, covering stocks, cryptocurrencies, and commodities.

This results from the previous improvement from December when Cashtags were powered via TradingView integration. As integrations go, it is a basic one but significant nonetheless. Twitter has by far the largest global reach across many communities; political, financial, crypto, and tech, to name a few.

More importantly, these communities often intertwine seamlessly and amplify each other. Following up on this implementation, what is eToro CEO’s take on the eToro-Twitter partnership?

eToro’s Lule Demmissie Interview

Cointelegraph reporter Joe Hall met with eToro CEO (US) Lule Demmissie on Friday. As a social trading app, eToro pioneered social trading just as Robinhood pioneered zero-commission trading.

Users can copy each other’s trades and share market insights and trends via Social News Feeds. Given this feature set, Demmissie sees the eToro-Twitter partnership as natural symbiosis.

“The symbiosis is really sort of like converse, learn, practice, invest.”

Going beyond the technicals, she views digital assets themselves as transformative.

“It’s a really transformative way of thinking about justice and capital formation – benefiting from the same thing that you feed.”

This is likely a reference to many memecoins trending on Twitter, with the latest newcomer being Pepe. They are purely driven by speculation and the power of memes, which means they derive value from the community that perceives them as valuable.

Therefore, in Demmissie’s words, communities feed capital formation in memecoins, but often with a little help from Elon Musk. The question is, what is the end goal for Musk’s Twitter?

Twitter as an X App Vanguard?

So far, it is safe to say that Twitter funnels its massive traffic flow into eToro. Yoni Addia, eToro CEO (international), had speculated as much when the eToro-Twitter partnership was sealed, plugging its 32-million strong user base into Twitter’s 450 million.

“There is very high quality content, real-time content on financial analysis of companies and what’s happening around the world. We believe this partnership will enable us to reach those new audiences [and] connect better the brands of Twitter and eToro.”

In other words, Twitter could be used as a trade launching pad. After all, the platform is the most likely origin for news and market insights to pop off first. This became evident during and after the FTX collapse.

Twitter had the most relevant and up-to-date information on SBF, while the mainstream media was either silent or tagging along. Moving on from actionable insight, yet still peppered with noise, what could Twitter become?

What Would the X App Need?

Elon Musk said on several occasions that he plans to transform Twitter into a “super app,” leveraging Twitter’s largest networking effect with the highest social impact. This new “X everything app” would enable users to transfer funds to each other “effortlessly with one click.”

This implies Twitter Blue subscription and identity verification as the bare minimum. It also implies a frictionless and scalable payment rail so users don’t have to lose money on transfer/trade fees.

Stablecoins as tokenized dollars are the clearest vehicle, as demonstrated by their high demand in Argentina and Turkey. Likewise, stablecoins are the first on-ramp for Bitcoin/altcoin trading, with their accumulation on exchanges often used as a market signal.

In that regard, Tron is the most frictionless network that works, despite originating from the controversial Justin Sun. However, there are other alternatives equally described as ‘enterprise-grade.’ One is Avalanche. Following the collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in January, Avalanche expansion was made easier with “one-click node deployment.”

Another alternative for fast and ultra-cheap payments could be XRP Ledger if Ripple Labs’ court battle is successfully concluded against the SEC. Ripple even launched a ready-to-go CBDC platform to facilitate remittances and issuing digital currencies. Each network has its entanglements, such as AWS, that could veer Musk in one direction over another.

Regardless of choice, the network could be powered by users as they host its nodes. Twitter users could then earn money as validators for facilitating transactions, making the network secure and decentralized.

That said, it is still unclear if Elon Musk is that big on blockchain technology in the first place, despite boosting various memecoins. When Sam Bankman-Fried was still considered a legitimate businessman, in April 2022, and before Musk bought Twitter, he said that:

“So long as I don’t have to have a laborious blockchain debate”

Musk also made it clear that…

“Blockchain twitter isn’t possible.”

If that is still the case, Elon Musk could follow in Jack Dorsey’s footsteps with his Block/Cash App ecosystem. Although negative for decentralization purposes, this pathway would make Musk more comfortable as he had already co-founded PayPal.

This article originally appeared on The Tokenist

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