Two days after launch, X's new Cashtags feature had already generated roughly $1 billion in trading volume. Nikita Bier, X's head of product, announced the figure on Friday, April 18, citing data from the platform's trading pilot. The feature went live Tuesday night.
First partner: Wealthsimple
Right now the feature is limited to iOS users in the US and Canada. Canadian online brokerage Wealthsimple signed on as the first broker partner - Canadian users who tap a crypto or stock ticker get taken directly to its trading page.
US brokers have not joined the pilot yet. Bitcoin and other assets are already viewable through Cashtags, with direct trading through American platforms expected once the feature exits its pilot phase.
What a Cashtag actually is
A Cashtag is a dollar-sign ticker: $BTC, $ETH, $AAPL, and so on. X introduced this kind of tagging years ago to track conversations around specific assets. Now those tags have become interactive - each one opens a live market data window.
The feature puts X in direct competition with Bloomberg Terminal, Yahoo Finance, and crypto exchanges for market data delivery. X's edge is its user base: 550 million monthly active users who already discuss markets there.
X Money: the bigger picture
Cashtags are the first piece of Musk's broader financial play. X is also building X Money, a P2P payments system with yield-bearing accounts, a cashback debit card, and other products. An external beta of X Money ran in March.
X holds money transmitter licenses in more than 40 US states and is registered with FinCEN. That regulatory groundwork gives the platform real financial infrastructure - not just a market-data layer on top of someone else's brokerage.
Scale and what comes next
The $1 billion figure covers only the Canadian market through Wealthsimple on iOS. Add US brokers and an Android rollout and volumes could multiply significantly. X's user base dwarfs every crypto exchange by a factor of many.
The market is watching which US broker signs first. That deal will go a long way toward answering whether X becomes a genuine financial super-app or stays a useful tool for checking prices.
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