In today’s news, Elon Musk, testifying before an Oakland jury in his civil trial against OpenAI, was asked about the company’s abandoned 2018 plan to raise capital through an initial cryptocurrency offering. He said that “some of them have merit, but most of them are scams,” characterizing the broad crypto market in more precise terms than any previous public statement.
At the same time, X also rolled out Web Cashtags, a feature that turns BTC, ETH, DOGE,
This is not a contradiction. This is a deliberate strategy to discredit the open, unregulated token market, while building a controlled and licensed financial ecosystem within a walled platform, where Musk, not the market, determines which assets are worthy of inclusion.
JUSTIN: Elon Musk said most cryptocurrencies were “scams” during his OpenAI court testimony.
“Some of them have merit, but most of them are scams.”
– Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru) April 30, 2026
News suspects that Musk’s public stance on crypto scams is less a statement of personal belief than a calculated regulatory signal, addressed to state licensing authorities from which X Payments has acquired money transfer licenses in more than 25 U.S. states, and to institutional partners whose cooperation requires serious fintech integration.
By positioning himself as a skeptic of speculative tokens, Musk is creating a political and regulatory distance between X’s financial infrastructure and market conduct that has drawn scrutiny from the SEC, effectively asserting, before regulators need to ask, that
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X Payments News and the Cashtags architecture: how controlled cryptographic integration actually works
The mechanism works as follows:
The Cashtags deployment is the surface of this consumer-facing architecture, providing users with curated price charts and social feeds for specific assets without routing them to external exchanges or unverified token markets. Bier laid out the product’s ambition directly, stating that “now,
The assets currently featured in Cashtags – BTC, ETH, DOGE, XRP, alongside stocks – are not random. They represent the most liquid, regulated, and institutionally readable end of the crypto market: assets with established custody infrastructure, exchange listings under regulatory oversight, and, in most cases, clear legal status in major jurisdictions.
Tesla’s own track record provides precedent for this selection logic: The company purchased $1.5 billion in Bitcoin in 2021, sold most of its position in 2022, and still held 11,509 BTC through the first quarter of this year, according to quarterly filings, a position valued at about $750 million at current prices. Musk has never held a comparable position in any of the tokens he has implicitly or explicitly criticized.
The regulatory scaffolding that X is building also adapts to the emerging legislative environment. White House efforts to clarify stablecoin policy through frameworks such as the GENIUS Act suggest that licensed, dollar-denominated digital payments – precisely what X Payments is architected on – will occupy a more defensible regulatory position than trading tokens on the open market.
A money transmitter license does not authorize trading in crypto assets, but it establishes the compliance infrastructure upon which broader financial products can be layered as legislative clarity improves.
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Daniel Frances is a technical writer and Web3 educator specializing in macroeconomics and DeFi mechanics. Hailing from crypto since 2017, Daniel leverages his experience in on-chain analytics to write evidence-based reports and in-depth guides. He holds certifications from the Blockchain Council and is dedicated to providing “insight gain” that overcomes market hype to find real utility for blockchain.
