Twitter To Allow Users To Send And Receive Tips Via Bitcoin

One of the largest social media giants to date, Twitter, made a sharp turn towards the crypto ecosystem with the introduction of a new wallet API into Twitter’s inner workings, called Strike. The wallet API, developed by Jack Mallers, allows Twitter users to send and receive BTC via a layer-2 lightning network solution.

“Today, Twitter enables free, instant, global payments for their users with their integration of the Strike API. What the internet did for communication, Bitcoin + the Lightning Network is doing for money,” Mallers announced on Twitter.

Along with Bitcoin, Twitter would also include nine more payment apps, with Venmo, Patreon, and CashApp being prime examples.

“There’s this growing interest among creators to use apps that run on the blockchain. We want to help creators participate in the promise of an evolving decentralized internet directly on Twitter,” Esther Crawford, product lead for creator monetization at Twitter, noted.

Twitter was on a mission to find a way to court creators by giving them more ways to share their work on the service, and more ways to make money. The social media giant would also grant some creators a subscription tool, called Super Follows, which allows them to collect cash from others on Twitter for exclusive content.

In turn, Twitter’s BTC tipping integration would boost the adoption rate of the Lightning network, which already saw a massive adoption over the past couple of years. According to data from Glassnode, currently, the Lightning network processes over 72,380 open payment channels, which is 226% from the stable baseline of around 32,000 channels established throughout 2019-20.

Meanwhile, Twitter made another big revelation, as the company announced its NFT plans. Twitter plans to add NFT authentication services, which would enable users to add their NFT wallets into their Twitter accounts.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s plans for adding Bitcoin functionalities on the social media do not end here, however. Dorsey and his payments company Square are working on a hardware walled and Bitcoin-based DeFi platform.

The Twitter Bitcoin adoption pushed Bitcoin’s price breached above the key resistance level of $45,000, before collapsing back to a current level of $41,223.88.

Source: CryptoBrowser

Bitcoin’s drop coincides with a widespread bearish trend in the crypto sector. Most of the top-100 cryptos are recording a negative price action, with only a handful of projects reacting positively in the past 24 hours.

Ethereum, for example, lost 8% off its price and is currently trading at $2,825.18, after reaching a daily high of $3,173.54. The weekly downwards trend managed to shed off anywhere from 10% to 20+% of the crypto prices. The total market cap of the sector has been shrinking over the past seven days, and currently is way below $2 trillion - falling from a high of $2.17 trillion to a current value of $1.86 trillion.