Crypto

X Money X Problems

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This week X, formerly Twitter, began the rollout of X Money. This has been something I have been anticipating since Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion in 2022.

“X Money is designed to make traditional bank accounts unnecessary for users.” — The Paypers

X Money is not simply a feature of X, but may be the reason Elon acquired the social media platform to begin with. Elon had originally envisioned X.com as a payments system all the way back in 1999. The concept behind it would go on to become PayPal. Elon has long understood the potential for innovation and opportunity when payments and finance finally merge with technology in a truly meaningful way. Far beyond the reaches of what CashApp and PayPal offer today.

X is positioning itself to become the WeChat of the rest of the world.

WeChat is China’s everything app, and has been for over a decade. Tencent launched it as a messaging service in 2011. Today it runs about 1.43 billion monthly users. It’s messaging, it’s a social feed, it’s video, and it’s WeChat Pay — roughly 935 million people paying for things by scanning a QR code, from a department store checkout down to a guy selling fruit off a cart. But the part Americans consistently miss is Mini Programs. These are app-like services that run inside WeChat itself, 4.3 million of them, used by around 945 million people a month. You book the doctor, hail the cab, pay the power bill, order dinner, buy the movie ticket, and file your government paperwork without ever leaving the app or downloading a single thing. You don’t have twelve apps, twelve logins, and twelve saved credit cards. You have one.

Yes, the Chinese version is restrictive, surveillance heavy, and censored. That’s not the part I’m pointing at. The singular model is the point. Whether we end up with their version of it here is a separate question.

Nobody in the West has built it — not because it can’t be built, but because the pieces were always owned by different companies with no reason to cooperate. Apple owns the wallet. Meta owns the social graph. Your bank owns the settlement layer. Elon is the first person sitting on all three at once.

X Money is offering Premium users 4% on their Stored Value Accounts and to its Premium+ users, 6%. Yes, 6% on cash you have parked in the X account, and they’re issuing digital debit cards and physical metal Visa cards. The card drops into Apple Pay and Google Pay, and a virtual version is issued the moment you sign up, so you’re spending before the metal one hits your mailbox. Not in New York, though — no money transmitter license there, which means no APY at all for New York residents. Massachusetts is out entirely. It’s live in 41 states plus D.C.

They have also partnered with Cross River Bank as their sponsor bank. X isn’t a bank and doesn’t hold a charter, so Cross River provides the charter, the FDIC-insured deposits, the compliance backbone and the payment rails. This is the banking-as-a-service model, and Cross River is effectively the bank behind fintech — a state-chartered New Jersey outfit in Fort Lee running more than 120 clients including Stripe, Affirm, Coinbase, Best Egg and Upstart on an $8 billion balance sheet. If you’ve ever financed a purchase through Affirm or moved money through Coinbase, Cross River probably executed it and you never knew their name. Deposits are insured to $250,000, with up to $10 million available through a cash sweep across partner institutions.

And the Stored Value Account doesn’t have to stop at cash. Right now X is paying 4% to Premium and 6% to Premium+ on dollars parked in the app. Let users hold stablecoins in that same account and the yield options widen considerably — tokenized Treasuries, on-chain lending, staking proof-of-stake assets like Ethereum or Solana. Your checking account, your savings account, and your brokerage stop being three separate things you log into.

There has been talk about “paying in crypto” with X Money, but I think that is the wrong angle to look at this. The GENIUS Act that passed in July 2025 by the US and signed by President Trump allows for a company like X to issue its own stablecoin, a cryptocurrency pegged one-to-one to a dollar and backed by reserves the issuer is legally obligated to redeem at face value, but they don’t even need to do that. They can allow X users to hold existing stablecoins (RLUSD, USDC) in their X value accounts, then transact them with merchants, peers, make payments, settling them with a blockchain like Solana, Ripple or Stellar as the middle layer. This will happen instantly and appear just as normal to someone as your standard PayPal transaction, but real-time settlement, with negligible fees on a ledger that confirms it for both sides. The change isn’t sending .0001 Bitcoin or Ethereum to pay for your burrito bowl, it’s that you don’t even see that layer underneath.

Innovation’s most bearish babe, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, wrote Musk in April flagging what she called a “suspicious carveout” that lets a private commercial company like X issue its own stablecoin, and noted that Thune had blocked a bipartisan floor amendment to close it. She’s right about the mechanism. She’s just wrong about which part should worry anyone.

When you swipe a card today, the transaction looks instant. It isn’t. What happened was an authorization — a promise. The real money moves later, batched overnight, run through the card network, settled between the merchant’s bank and yours over the next day or three. Venmo and Cash App are the same trick. Your balance updates the second you hit send because the app is just moving a number from one row of its own ledger to another row of its own ledger. The actual dollars are still sitting at a bank, waiting on ACH.

Distributed ledger technology collapses all of it. The transfer is the settlement. There is no authorization, then clearing, then settlement — there’s one event on a ledger both sides can verify, running 24 hours. That’s the important change. Not the currency, the plumbing. If it seems inconsequential, it frees up trillions of dollars in capital currently kept in limbo when done at scale.

X Money can put that in the palm of your hand. (Yes, perhaps like the Mark of the Beast.)

The move could potentially merge banking, investing, social media and AI into a singular app.

“When I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life.” — Elon Musk

The concept of the “everything app” is the next evolution in the “everything phone,” the smart phone. A smart-app that allows users to go back and forth between all of these aspects seamlessly, when done well, reduces friction to such a degree that adoption becomes inevitable.

The future is already being born. The good thing about it is that it only comes one day at a time.

Photo: Daniel Oberhaus, CC BY-SA 4.0

Bitcoin Brain

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Many people who I admire as intelligent thinkers and creative minds suffer from a key blind spot I see occurring repeatedly. From Andrew Torba, Jay Dyer and Sam Hyde — they all carry a condition I describe as Bitcoin Brain. Or as the crypto community outside the Bitcoin bubble refers to them, Bitcoin Maxis.

Through this condition, which as it appears to me is caused by having bought into Bitcoin, or BTC, at a significantly lower price, realized 50-200x gains on the asset, and now have a devotion to it that causes all criticism of it to put them into a state of cognitive dissonance.

Just mentioning use cases for other cryptocurrency projects can trigger an adverse reaction. Bring up ISO 20022-compliant utility tokens in a social setting and you’ll more often than not hook a maxi who will launch into a myopic BTC fueled diatribe that lays out several of the arguments I’ll counter in this article.

To be clear, this is not financial advice. Nothing here is a price prediction. We could see a $200k, $300k, $400k Bitcoin, depending on how much institutional money comes into the asset in the near term.

Price is not the argument I’m making. What I’m interested in is the shifting paradigm — that a first generation technology from 2009, one that is slower, more expensive, and has fewer real world uses than what came after it, is still being sold to us as a revolutionary force in the future of global finance.

There is a maximum supply cap of twenty-one million Bitcoins. This is often one of the first points made by the champions of the token, scarcity.

There is a finite amount of gold. There is a finite amount of silver. There is a finite amount of beachfront property in Malibu. And there is a finite amount of Bitcoin. All four of those are true, but one of these things is not like the other.

Gold is scarce because it can’t be manufactured. You cannot copy the periodic table, change one line, and roll out Gold 2 with an extra 21 million tons.

There are other cryptos. And it isn’t just that they exist — it’s that they already do things Bitcoin is technologically incapable of doing. Foreign exchange that happens damn near instantly. Payments that settle across the world in seconds for a fraction of a penny. Commodities trading around the clock with a record of every transaction that’s open for anyone to inspect and impossible to go back and doctor.

So sure, you could build Bitcoin 2 and mint yourself another 21 million tokens. But why would you want to? You’d be launching a brand new product that’s already a generation behind the competition. Nobody would give it a second look.

And that says something very damning about the asset.

The original pitch, the one that made every libertarian I know fall in love, was peer-to-peer electronic cash outside the money printing governments and their fiat system.

It doesn’t do that and it never really did. Transactions take ten minutes to confirm and about an hour before anyone serious calls them final, fees float on congestion, and nobody is buying a latte with it.

The fix that BTC developers promised for eight years running has been the Lightning Network, where payments happen off-chain and settle in bulk later. On paper it solves the problem in an inefficient way. In practice, the node count continues to decrease, inhibiting its ability to ever operate at scale. But as is often the case with Bitcoin, the goal posts have already been moved. The pitch now is that it’s a “store of value,” not currency, not a payments network. When has a store of value been so volatile?

While we’re doing inventory, there’s the matter of what’s been buying all this. Tether is the largest stablecoin on earth and for years people have wondered whether every digital dollar it issues actually is backed by a real one. The stablecoins can then be used in transactions to trade for Bitcoin.

In 2021 that got answered twice. New York settled with them over misrepresenting the backing, and the CFTC found Tether had enough actual cash to cover the tokens on about a quarter of the days they examined.

“Tether reserves were not ‘fully-backed’ the majority of the time.” — CFTC

They paid, admitted nothing, and publish quarterly reports now. But it’s why, every time the market rips and somebody notices Tether minted another billion the week before, people get squinty. Bitcoin Maxis have frequently responded to this by saying some variation of, “if the Federal Reserve can print money, why can’t we?” These are supposed to be the adults in the room in the blockchain space?

That era is ending anyway. The GENIUS Act puts stablecoins under real federal rules by January 2027 — dollar-for-dollar reserves and audited books. What happens when Bitcoin’s money printer gets shut off?

This is part of the new arc for Bitcoin. It was the money you didn’t need permission to use. Now its loudest defenders spend their days begging Fortune 500 companies to put it on their balance sheets and are lobbying Washington to stockpile it.

Bitcoin has the earmarks of a brand-name, trillion-dollar pump and dump, and it traces back to its strange origins and the host of shady players acting on its behalf.


Michael Saylor’s pitch boils down to: who cares what it costs today when it’s going to be worth millions later? He’s even put a number on it.

“Every Bitcoin you don’t buy today is going to cost you $13 million.” — Michael Saylor

That isn’t an argument. It’s a forecast, and you’re expected to take his word for it.

Saylor is also not a new character, which is the part nobody brings up. In March of 2000, at the peak of dot-com mania, his company announced it had to restate two years of financials. The stock went from $333 a share to $86 in a single day.

The SEC charged him with accounting fraud that December. He settled and admitted nothing. For a stretch there he was the single biggest loser of the entire bubble — his stake went from roughly $10 billion to $566 million.

Twenty-five years later he runs the same company under a new name and has bet all of it on one asset. Strategy holds roughly 840,000 Bitcoin (4% of the total possible supply) at an average cost around $75,000 a coin. Bitcoin is currently in the low $60Ks.

He also said for six straight years that he would never sell, that anyone who sells is weak. This month’s filing shows him selling Bitcoin to buy back his own preferred stock.

The engine that made the whole thing work was the premium. His stock traded at a big multiple to the Bitcoin behind it, so he could print shares, buy coins, and somehow end up with more Bitcoin per share than he started with. That premium is gone.

And since Saylor has admitted Bitcoin would trade lower without his weekly bid, the biggest buyer on earth flipping into a seller is not a small thing.

Then there’s Satoshi Nakamoto. That’s the name on the whitepaper that started all of this back in 2008. He built the thing, ran it for two years, answered questions on message boards, then stopped writing in 2011 and was never heard from again. Nobody knows who he is. Nobody knows if he’s one person or several.

He also has about a million coins that he mined himself in the early days, roughly five percent of every Bitcoin that will ever exist. Sixty-some billion dollars. It has not moved in fifteen years. The price has gone through the roof four separate times and he never touched a dime of it.

Three ways to explain that. He lost the keys, he’s dead, or he isn’t a person at all.

In 1996, twelve years before any of this, the NSA published a paper called “How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash.” It walks through how you’d go about building an untraceable digital currency. They also designed the mathematical lock the whole system still runs on.

That’s not proof of anything. But if you’re asking who could invent a global currency, launch it, walk away and never once get caught, the list is short and they’re on it.

Here’s why that matters beyond being a fun theory. If Satoshi is a man, five percent of the supply is a mystery. If Satoshi is an agency, five percent of the supply is a loaded gun. Sit on it for thirty years while the thing gets baked into pension funds and corporate balance sheets and the national reserve, then wake up the wallet and cash in.

The mother of all rug pulls. And you’d never see it coming, because you never knew who was holding it.

The founder of the world’s most valuable monetary network being permanently and conveniently missing gets filed by his followers as epic mythology, not as the enormous red flag it is.

Along those lines, in 2014 Jeffrey Epstein put about half a million into Blockstream’s seed round, the company employing some of the most influential contributors to Bitcoin’s code. He also cut MIT a check that landed in 2015, right when the Bitcoin Foundation went broke and the developers maintaining the code had no employer. The lab picked up three of them.

“I have spoken to some of the founders of Bitcoin who are very excited.” — Jeffrey Epstein

Nobody involved has been accused of wrongdoing, and none of this means Epstein controlled Bitcoin. But at the most fragile moment in the network’s history — no foundation, no money, a handful of guys with the keys to the codebase — the man paying the bills was Jeffrey Fucking Epstein?

How could a decentralized, borderless currency be an asset to someone running an international human trafficking and blackmail ring?

Then there’s the quantum problem. Google researchers put out estimates this year suggesting a quantum computer could crack Bitcoin’s security faster than the network can produce a single block. Roughly a third of all coins are sitting in the kind of accounts where that’s a live concern, ‘Satoshi’s’ included.

So a proposal went up in April to phase out the vulnerable accounts and eventually freeze the coins of anyone who doesn’t move theirs in time.

Freeze the accounts. The unchangeable ledger with the rules nobody can touch is now having a public argument about icing out a third of the supply. They have once again lost the plot.

So where does this land? Two of BTC’s biggest problems, transaction cost and speed, are already solved. Just not by Bitcoin.

Wrap it, or tokenize it, and settle it on a distributed ledger built for payments and it clears in seconds for a fraction of a penny. The XRP Ledger does it, Stellar does it, and DTCC has already named both in its tokenization patent.

Bitcoin Maxis prefer to position it as the only crypto that will be left standing, keeping the blinders up is key, because the world realizing its limitations is a pitfall that shatters the illusion.

And when it happens, the price of Bitcoin will no longer be what drives the asset class at large.

Bitcoin being decoupled from the rest of the cryptocurrency space as the real-world adoption of utility coins (things that actually solve trillion-dollar problems) leads the way will spark one of the largest mass-hysteria events we’ve seen as Bitcoin Maxis attempt to rationalize what has come to pass.

Bitcoin has been a mainstream media marketing campaign. It has been a successful red herring designed to avert the attention of the masses while the rails of a new financial system using distributed ledger, smart contract and blockchain technology are being built with little fanfare outside of the crypto sphere. (Make no mistake, the smart money is not going to miss the boat on this.)

It’ll most likely always be around. As I stated, it may shatter through all-time-highs in the interim, but there will be a paradigm shift.

There is serious institutional, political, and potentially dark-money pressure to continue propping up the mirage. But in the end, I do believe Bitcoin will be remembered at best as the VCR of cryptocurrency, at worst as a multi-trillion dollar capital extraction conspiracy.

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0