Elon Musk's social platform now supports sending tips in bitcoins through integration with the BitBit crypto wallet, which uses the Lightning Network solution. The new feature became available on August 18 and works in Chrome-compatible browsers.
BitBit allows sending and receiving tips in bitcoins in the banned social network X in Russia, without giving up control over one's funds. The wallet is not an official product of X but works as an add-on in the platform's interface. Tip recipients have 21 days to collect their funds, after which they are automatically returned to the sender.
BitBit operates on the Lightspark Spark infrastructure, which simplifies transactions on the Lightning Network. Lightspark's CEO David Marcus stated that the goal of the integration is to align 'digital money with open internet standards.'
Interestingly, despite Musk repeatedly publicly supporting the meme coin Dogecoin, the new tipping feature includes only bitcoin. And while social network users believed that the meme token would be the first cryptocurrency integrated into crypto payments on the platform.
Alongside the tipping feature, XChat was introduced, an updated messaging service with the ability for voice and video calls, encrypted messages, disappearing chats, and file sharing.
Musk called it 'Bitcoin-style encryption,' which drew objections from developers who noted that the digital asset does not use encryption in the traditional sense, but relies on elliptic curve-based cryptography and hashing.
Currently, XChat is only available to paying subscribers and is protected by a four-digit password. It is written in the Rust programming language.