This is being done through their new Tips feature — being able to tip other users Bitcoin on Twitter through the Lightning Network (a layer-two solution for Bitcoin).

Esther Crawford, Head of Product at Twitter, had this to say when unveiling the new rollout on Thursday:

Tips, the new feature rolled out this past May (previously only being able to use certain payment services such as Bandcamp, Cash App, Patreon, PayPal and Venmo to send money) now allows users to add their Bitcoin address or current Bitcoin Lightning wallet to send and receive Bitcoin to other Twitter users anywhere in the world. What’s more, the transactions are free, and the settlements are instant, with no required middlemen to broker the deal (bye-bye Western Union). It is currently only available for iOS users at the moment, with accessibility for Android soon to come.

As Jack Mallers, Strike Founder & CEO, emphatically writes in his Medium blog post:

“Twitter’s integration with the Strike API turns Twitter into one of the best remittance experiences in the world, one of the greatest global creator marketplaces in the world, one of the greatest global payment experiences in the world, one of the best global micropayment marketplaces in the world, and allows an internet communications company to interoperate with the monetary standard for the world, enabling global payments for their users.”

This is an enormous achievement for all parties included, including the consumer. Being able to send money anywhere in the world through a third-party service on a popular social platform, that doesn’t charge any fees or take any cuts on the remittances, is no small feat.

In the same Medium post, Mallers, with the invigorated brio of someone who desperately wants to change the world for the better, likens this watershed moment to the beginnings of the internet:

“What the internet did for communication, Bitcoin and the Lightning Network is doing for money. The Lightning Network is dematerializing all segregated, independent, bifurcated monetary networks onto one single global standard.”

This isn’t the only company Strike plans on integrating its API with for payments, they say. There is “a select group of partners, ranging from small businesses to the largest companies in the world” that Strike is intimately working with on similar rollouts for the upcoming weeks.

It’s obvious within the past year that Twitter has not been shy to experiment with its platform and its overall direction as a company — Spaces, Tips, subtly changing its font (Chirp), the confusing ‘Follow’ button color fiasco, and also, future plans to incorporate a Bitcoin decentralized exchange, and an NFT (non-fungible token) authentication feature that allows users to authenticate their digital art and property online.

Twitter, earlier in the year, has also stated its ambitious intent on decentralizing its currently-centralized social media model through its self-funded initiative ‘bluesky,’ headed by seasoned crypto developer, Jay Graber. The project is still in its infancy at the moment, but it’ll certainly be curious to see how all of this unfolds.

With Bitcoin and Lightning Network as the first open, transparent, global money protocols now functioning on one of the world’s biggest social media platforms, the sky (or should we say, bluesky’s) the limit for where this could all go next.