Cross River Bank

Tat Thang

@tatthang

Not a single fintech CEO slept well last night. X just shipped a full financial stack in 48 hours. And most people didn't even notice. Here's the sequence: - Tuesday: Smart Cashtags go live. Any ticker, any contract address native price chart, right in the timeline. No redirect. No third-party app. - Already in beta: X Money. Fiat wallet with 6% APY, metal Visa debit card with 3% cashback, P2P payments, direct deposit. FDIC-insured through Cross River Bank, the same bank behind Coinbase and Stripe. - Already live: Brokerage routing via Wealthsimple. One tap from a post to a placed trade. Three products. All shipped. All pointing the same direction: Discovery → Chart → Trade → Pay. Inside one timeline scroll. Here's what that looks like for you and me: Someone posts a $AAPL cashtag. I tap it. Chart loads. I see the conversation around it. I buy. Never left the app. I send $50 to a friend. On X. I earn 6% on what's left. My debit card gives me 3% back on coffee. Why would I open Robinhood? Why would I open Venmo? Why would I open CoinGecko? And here's why they can't compete: X has 550M monthly users. Robinhood has 24M funded accounts. Venmo has ~90M accounts. CoinGecko has ~30M monthly visits. X doesn't need the best product. It needs a good-enough product inside the app people already live in. Now zoom out. X was an ad revenue company. ~$4.4B in 2023, almost all advertising. The new revenue stack: > Visa interchange on every card swipe > Brokerage referral fees on every routed trade > APY spread on held deposits > Trading behavior data from 550M users X didn't add a feature. X changed its entire business model. "Is this good for X?" Wrong question. X just stopped being a social media company. It's now a financial infrastructure company that happens to have 550 million users already scrolling. Everyone else is competing against a distribution gap they can never close. I wrote about this yesterday before any of it was announced. The sequence played out exactly as mapped. The only piece left: which chain gets the default crypto trading slot. That answer will move markets.

Anish Moonka

@anishmoonka

Elon Musk owned a company called X years before Twitter existed. It was not a social network. It was an online bank, founded in March 1999 with $12 million from the sale of his first startup, Zip2, to Compaq. https://t.co/SUfT7hHNgF merged with a rival called Confinity in 2000, and the combined company took a new name a year later: PayPal. Musk was pushed out as CEO during that merger and replaced by Peter Thiel, another PayPal cofounder. eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002. Musk, the largest shareholder, walked away with more than $165 million. He did not walk away with the domain. PayPal held onto https://t.co/SUfT7hHNgF and let it sit unused for the next fifteen years, while Musk went on to found SpaceX and take a stake in Tesla, which later named an SUV the Model X. Then, in July 2017, Musk bought the domain back. He confirmed it in a tweet, said the price was undisclosed, and added that it had sentimental value to him. He had no plans for it at the time. People who track domain sales guessed he paid somewhere between ten and a hundred million dollars for a website that showed nothing but a blank page. Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022. Nine months later, on July 23, 2023, he announced it would become X. The blue bird logo was gone within a day. His biographer, Walter Isaacson, has said Musk was completing an idea he first tried to build in 1999: a single app for messaging, payments, shopping, and everything else, modeled loosely on WeChat, a Chinese app that already does all of that in one place. Three years after that announcement, in June 2026, X launched X Money. It pays 6 percent interest on deposits held at Cross River Bank, insures them the same way a normal bank account is insured, and issues a metal debit card with 3 percent cashback. It is basically an online bank: the same pitch https://t.co/SUfT7hHNgF made in 1999, running on a domain that took Musk fifteen years to buy back.

Rob Cunningham

@KuwlShow

XPay, XRPL, XRP, RippleNet, and Agentic AI form a powerful, complementary stack that can accelerate the shift from today’s fragmented payments and finance to a seamless, intelligent, user-sovereign “Agentic Economy.” • X Pay (@XMoney) expansion — Early public access rolled out in 2026 with P2P transfers, @Visa debit card, cashback, and high-yield features inside the X app. It is expanding to more U.S. premium users and leveraging regulated banking partners (e.g., connections like Cross River Bank, an early @Ripple collaborator). • XRPL AI Starter Kit launch (June 2026) — Ripple released tools, documentation, and integrations specifically for agentic payments. It supports the x402 protocol so AI agents can autonomously pay for APIs, compute, digital services, and invoices using XRP and RLUSD directly on XRPL. Settlement in 3–5 seconds with predictable costs and built-in institutional controls (escrow, multisig, deposit auth).44 • Basic agent + payment synergies — Early @grok /xAI agents (or similar) inside @X can handle simple intents (“pay @ user optimally” or “subscribe and manage renewals”). XRPL’s native DEX + AMM improvements (new curve types, better stablecoin liquidity) and RLUSD growth make on-ramps/off-ramps smoother. • RippleNet + XRPL growth — Continued expansion of institutional corridors, stablecoin-powered cross-border payments (RLUSD, others), and RWA tokenization momentum on XRPL (already seeing rapid inflows in 2026). • EARLY X ecosystem hooks — XPay users gain convenient access to XRPL rails via partners or future direct features. RWA exposure begins for retail via the app. Outcome: Reduced friction for users and early agents. X becomes a convenient front-end; XRPL/XRP/RLUSD handle fast, cheap, programmable settlement; RippleNet provides institutional reach. First real “agent pays for services” use cases appear. MEDIUM-Term (2028–2030): Full Agentic Civilization This is where the stack compounds powerfully: • X + XPay as the Intelligent Sovereign Interface — Users (and their agents) interact primarily through X. Natural language or delegated goals (“Optimize my global payments and yield while staying liquid”) trigger autonomous execution. • Agentic AI Layer (Grok-style agents + x402) — Agents plan, negotiate, optimize, and execute across rails. They use XRPL’s deterministic finality and predictable costs without smart-contract risk for core value movement. x402 enables machine-to-machine micropayments at scale. • XRPL as the High-Performance Settlement & DeFi/RWA Layer — 3–5 second finality, native AMM/DEX, Single Asset Vaults (lending), oracles, MPTs for stablecoins/RWAs, EVM sidechain for broader interoperability. RLUSD provides stable on-chain value; XRP serves as the efficient bridge asset for cross-currency and liquidity. • XRP as the Bridge & Liquidity Layer — Powers On-Demand Liquidity (ODL)-style flows, cross-currency atomic swaps, and deep liquidity pools. Demand grows with every tokenized asset and agent-driven transaction. • RippleNet as the Institutional Connectivity Layer — Banks, payment providers, and corporates plug in via regulated rails. Agents can route through these corridors when needed for compliance-heavy or fiat-heavy flows, while XRPL handles the heavy lifting for speed and cost. Emerging Capabilities: • Autonomous DeFi/RWA management (agents allocate across tokenized assets on XRPL). • True machine-to-machine economy (devices/agents pay each other in real time). • Hybrid fiat-crypto flows that feel invisible to the user. • Programmable compliance and audit trails built into the rails. • User sovereignty: Own identity, assets, data, and agents - with XPay/X as the intuitive control layer. Why This Stack Wins Synergies Component Strength Synergistic Role with Others XPay / X User-friendly social interface Front-end for intent & control XRPL Speed, cost, native features, controls Settlement, DeFi, RWAs, agent rails XRP Bridge asset, liquidity

Muskonomy

@muskonomy

NEWS: Cross River Bank CEO calls X Money the first social media FDIC insured banking platform 👀 Gilles Gade, founder and CEO of Cross River Bank, said X Money will bring regulated banking and payments to hundreds of millions of X users when fully available. "When fully available, XMoney will deliver to hundreds of millions of X users intuitive and elegant payments and account functionalities with the full consumer protection and trust of a regulated entity," Gade said. He called it a game changer for consumers and the market, with much more to come in the coming weeks. (Source: Gilles Gade, Cross River Bank, July 2026)

The Macro Paper

@macropaperr

ELON MUSK JUST TURNED X INTO A BANK. And it's offering 12x more interest than JPMORGAN. X Money just launched nationwide across the US for Premium subscribers, completing Musk's biggest step yet toward turning X into an "EVERYTHING APP" A single app for social media, payments, and now banking. Here's what it actually gives you. - A dollar wallet. - A metal Visa debit card with your handle on it. - Free instant transfers to any X account. - Free wires, bill pay, and mailed checks. - Direct deposit up to two days early. - And 3% unlimited cashback on purchases. X Money offers up to 6% APY on cash sitting in the app, roughly 12 times the national average savings rate, and higher than what JPMorgan, Bank of America, or most high yield savings accounts pay. Here's the catch. The Fed's own rate sits at just 3.5-3.75%. For X to pay depositors 6%, someone has to cover that gap, likely through fees, data, or other revenue, not free money. Several analysts think the 6% is a temporary promo to drive adoption, not a permanent rate. X doesn't actually hold a bank charter. Your money sits at Cross River Bank, a partner bank already covered by FDIC insurance up to the standard $250,000. To offer $10 million in coverage, X spreads large balances across roughly 40 different partner banks, a workaround, not one big guarantee. Senator Elizabeth Warren has already sent Musk a formal letter, raising questions about sanctioned users still having X access, Cross River's history of FDIC enforcement actions, and whether X eventually plans to launch its own stablecoin. Speaking of crypto, X already lets you track live prices through Cashtags. What's still missing is the ability to actually buy crypto, a built-in wallet, or treasury access. But Musk has reposted predictions that all of this is coming next. With X's 600 million monthly users, any future crypto layer would have instant scale that took apps like Venmo and Cash App years to build. This is the clearest sign yet of what Musk actually means by "everything app."

Auny 🧡

@AunySillyMe

So… few FAQs I found out because people on 𝕏 are just the best source of info 1. If you haven’t received access, your state might not have approved 𝕏 money. So patience 🧘🏽‍♀️ 2. Premium+ gets $25 and 6%, premium gets $15 and 4% APY bonus 3. 𝕏 money is managed by a bank so if you lose your 𝕏 account, your money still stays safe and accessible (Cross River Bank) 4. Your $ is also FDIC insured 5. ‘Fast 24/7 support’ is available 6. There is a separate app for 𝕏 money too! 7. It’s a metal card with tap to pay 🤑 8. You can send/request money with any 𝕏 user that has access 9. 3% cashback on eligible purchases 10. Extreme micro-transactions are allowed on 𝕏 app What’s the first thing you’ll do when you get access? I’m sending 69cents to @elonmusk 😂

Gilles Gade

Founder, Chairman & CEO

Founder, chairman and CEO of Cross River, which he started in 2008 to blend banking with technology.