Elon Musk has quietly switched X Money—formerly shrouded in code-leak rumors—into live testing–but despite years of hints, Dogecoin is still nowhere to be seen. Responding late Sunday to a fan account that had trumpeted “X Money soon,” the X owner wrote: “This will be a very limited access beta at first. When people’s savings are involved, extreme care must be taken.” The post, timestamped May 25, is the clearest signal yet that Musk is ready to expose a real-world user cohort to the long-promised payments layer inside his “everything app.”
The confirmation locks in a timeline Musk has toyed with since buying Twitter in 2022 and re-branding it as X. X Money is envisioned as a full wallet and banking stack that sits natively inside the social network, edging it toward Tencent’s WeChat model. Internal milestones suggest a broader US rollout “later this year,” but Musk’s caveat underscores that initial testers will number in the low thousands at most, giving engineers a controlled environment in which to watch balances and transfers behave under real stress.
If the beta feels cautious, the regulatory chessboard explains why. X Payments has amassed money-transmitter licences in 41 US states and the District of Columbia, according to the company’s own disclosures and NMLS filings. Missing from that list is New York, whose Department of Financial Services demands the famously onerous BitLicense for any crypto-adjacent activity.
Earlier this month two Manhattan lawmakers urged DFS to deny X Money’s application, warning that Musk’s “pattern of reckless conduct” made him unfit to handle consumer funds. “What we’re talking about is nothing less than Elon Musk becoming a permanent part of the country’s financial infrastructure—with access to enormous quantities of consumer data,” Assemblymember Micah Lasher said in a letter.
California—another heavyweight jurisdiction—granted its licence in late 2024, smoothing the path for Visa to become X Money’s first network partner. At January’s CES, X CEO Linda Yaccarino said users would fund an in-app “X Wallet” instantly via Visa Direct and move money to bank accounts in real time, adding that the Visa tie-in was “the first of many big announcements” for 2025.
No Dogecoin In Sight
For the crypto market, the unanswered question is whether Musk will fold digital assets—especially his meme-coin of choice, Dogecoin—into the product. Sunday’s exchange offered no such hint; neither did Yaccarino’s Visa reveal. That silence matches January’s messaging and runs counter to years of speculation that Musk would use Dogecoin to jump-start adoption.
If the limited beta proceeds without incident, X Payments expects to widen access state-by-state as remaining licences land. New York’s verdict looms largest; success there would unlock Wall Street users and cement X’s claim to national coverage. Even without Dogecoin and crypto rails, the service positions X to levy interchange and wallet fees—a new revenue channel for a platform still “barely breaking even,” as Musk admitted to staff in January.
For now, Dogecoin remains on the sidelines, its fate tethered to regulatory clarity and Musk’s own risk appetite. But with a live beta finally in motion, the window for decisive technical integration—fiat or otherwise—has opened. The Dogecoin community will be watching every commit, every licence approval, and every hint in Musk’s notoriously cryptic replies.
At press time, Dogecoin traded at $0.228.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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