As Wall Street investors brace for a raft of Big Tech earnings this week, the cryptocurrency world will have its eyes and ears fixed on something slightly different. Specifically, whether Google or Twitter, which report earnings Tuesday (Oct. 25), will shed fresh insight into how the tech giants’ and the social media powerhouses plan to integrate digital assets and payments into their day-to-day operations.
The same thing applies to their metaverse and/or Web3 strategies, as those ultimately involve crypto payments almost by default. And given their high priority in the marketing world these days, its perhaps more likely that investor-focused earnings reports and analyst calls will focus on them more than on the somewhat narrower — albeit nearer — crypto payments segment.
I Tawt I Taw a Payments Crypto
However, the reverse likely applies to Twitter, which has a much smaller scope and also stronger focus on crypto payments that dates back to former CEO Jack Dorsey, now head of bitcoin-friendly payments firm Block.
Twitter may not be the most consequential of this week’s earnings reports, but given the on-again, off-again, currently on-again state of the company’s sale to crypto-friendly Tesla CEO and world’s richest man Elon Musk, it’s the one most likely to focus on payments in general and crypto payments in particular. (It’s also least likely to focus on Web3, which Musk has called a “marketing buzzword” on Twitter.)
I’m not suggesting web3 is real – seems more marketing buzzword than reality right now – just wondering what the future will be like in 10, 20 or 30 years. 2051 sounds crazy futuristic!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 20, 2021
Back in June, Musk said “money is fundamentally digital at this point and has been for a while. It would make sense to integrate payments into Twitter, so it’s easy to send money back and forth.”
Adding that he wanted to turn Twitter into a social media super app modeled on China’s WeChat — which he said “does everything, sort of like Twitter, plus PayPal, plus a whole bunch of things, and all rolled into one” — the dogecoin booster said that requires a “high-trust situation,” in which “payments, whether it’s crypto or fiat, can make a lot of sense.”
Twitter’s current leadership has also pushed into crypto payments, revealing on April 22 that it had partnered with payments processor Stripe “to begin offering crypto payouts to creators via Stripe so they have more choice in how they get paid,” according to Esther Crawford, Twitter’s product lead for creators.
In May, the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, kicked in $500 million to back Musk’s Twitter bid, putting another crypto payments’ advocate in the buyout proposal.
That means there is likely to be more of a focus on crypto payments in Twitter’s earnings report than from other major tech and social media firms.
Google Pays Attention
Google began looking into crypto payments back in January, when it formed a blockchain and related technologies division shortly after Google Payments and Commerce President Arnold Goldberg, a PayPal veteran, said the company pays “a lot of attention to crypto.”
Earlier this month, its Google Cloud division teamed up with Nasdaq-listed cryptocurrency exchange and crypto payments technology provider Coinbase on a partnership aimed at Web3 developers. In that announcement, Coinbase said it would use Google Cloud to build its platform.
Google Cloud, for its part, said it would “enable select customers, starting with those in the Web3 ecosystem, to pay for its cloud services via select cryptocurrencies” using Coinbase Commerce’s merchant payments tools.
The “new payments experience will benefit Google Cloud’s customers and partners by increasing the optionality of payments for Google Cloud services,” it added.
Back in July, the major crypto exchange Crypto.com added Google Pay as a way to buy crypto on its site. And while that’s not really a Google initiative, it did show that Google Pay was willing to be used for crypto payments — which has not always been the case for banks.
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