Bitcoin Tipping Makes It Easy To Transfer Value, Says Twitter CFO Who Sees Crypto As A Tool To “Facilitate Commerce”

Payments giant Visa, which also reported a record Q3 in payment volume of $2.8 trillion, said, “the boost we saw in Q3 was primarily from cryptocurrency purchases.”

Twitter Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal says cryptocurrency will be a tool to “facilitate commerce” on the social network. This has been a response to the social media giant using Bitcoin to tip on the platform through scalable layer 2 solution Lightning Network.

Talking about the tipping jar introduced on Twitter, Segal said,

“I’ve received some tips in bitcoin already… it’s fun to play with the product and give people the opportunity to do so as well.”

“We think about tips as just an example of how we want to help people get paid,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg adding, “we just want to make it as easy as possible to allow value to transfer from one person to another.”

He added that Bitcoin would also be key in “breaking down the barriers” between content creators and their audiences.

The CFO sees the usage of cryptocurrency to improve commerce on the platform in the long term and to diversify its presence across multiple sectors, and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) will also become a central element to that.

“You’ll see more commerce opportunities over time, but commerce doesn’t have to mean buying physical goods. Commerce can mean helping somebody transact where they are subscribing to a new service, it could mean buying an NFT. It doesn’t have to be physical in nature,” Segal said In a separate interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box.

VC guys keep trying to make cryptocurrency a global standard by spending billions to invent less-attractive versions of Bitcoin, instead of just buying payment-system companies to make the most common cash registers and apps support crypto payments by default.

Pro-gamer move.

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 23, 2021

Unlike Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s other company Square, which has Bitcoin on its balance sheet, the social platform is not invested in the crypto asset but will continue to look into that direction.

“We’ll have to change our investment policy and change our point of view more broadly to add Bitcoin on our balance sheet (…). It doesn’t make sense today given the types of securities we buy, the risk profile, the volatility, but we’ll keep watching and thinking about it over time.”

Recently, Dorsey also took to Twitter to comment on the state of inflation in the US, saying hyperinflation is coming. “It will happen in the US soon, and so the world,” he said in response to inflation in Nigeria increasing to 16%.

Hyperinflation is going to change everything. It’s happening.

— jack⚡️ (@jack) October 23, 2021

During the Q3 earnings call this week, Dorsey also commented on Bitcoin tipping for tipping products, saying it’s Bitcoin’s global accessibility, no matter where one is in the world, that makes it so interesting. “It gives us much more speed,” he added.

For Q3, Twitter reported revenue growth of 45% to $742 million, sales totaling $1.28 billion, seeing an increase of 37% year over year, and mDAU in the US growing by a net 1 million year-over-year.

This week, payments giant Visa also reported its Q3 financial results in which it saw a record payment volume of $2.8 trillion, up 21%. “The boost we saw in Q3 was primarily from cryptocurrency purchases,” noted CFO Vasant Prabhu.

During the company’s earnings call, CEO Al Kelly said, “blockchains also will continue to expand our network of networks,” and already they have almost 60 crypto platform partners.

“I think some of these players will help continue to digitize payments and take money away from cash.”

They’re “already capturing over $3.5 billion of payment volume in FY ’21.” In terms of cross-border e-commerce as well, the company “saw a spike last quarter because of cryptocurrency.”