At Musk’s request, Twitter added widgets with cryptocurrency rates

Elon Musk is not going to step down as Twitter CEO after his recent poll and is introducing new functionality on the platform. Recently, the social network added a new option that allows users to search for the price of bitcoin or ethereum by simply entering cryptocurrency tickers in the search bar.

The new feature is an enhancement to «$Cashtags,» which Twitter Business announced on its profile yesterday, December 21. The announcement states that whenever someone tweets a symbol of a stock, exchange-traded fund, or cryptocurrency with a U.S. dollar icon in front of it, users will be able to see an active link that will take them to search results with price charts for the assets in question. Busines also noted on Twitter that a simple search for a stock or cryptocurrency ticker will also show a price chart.

Today, on December 22, Elon Musk retweeted the announcement of the new feature, saying that it is «one of many product improvements coming to financial Twitter.»

One of many product improvements coming to financial Twitter!

Nice work by Twitter team. https://t.co/CKLH8OtDDW

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2022

It seems that BTC and ETH are the only cryptocurrencies with price charts on the social network. Other virtual coins from the top 100, including Musk’s favorite Dogecoin, do not currently have such privileges. However, Twitter Business said that it «expects to expand the reach of the symbols and improve the user experience in the coming weeks.»

The variations for the flagship cryptocurrency — «$Bitcoin», «bitcoin price», and «BTC price» — open the price chart. The corresponding search queries also work for Ethereum.

Tech blogger Jane Mastodon Wong told her 158,700 Twitter followers that the source of the chart is the trading analysis platform TradingView.

The chart is actually an image sourced from @tradingview with URLslike:https://t.co/opD10sWnLY https://t.co/hUBbP9hpMe

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) December 21, 2022

The price charts also contain a link with a «View Robinhood» icon, which indicates that the retail platform has partnered with Twitter. Users can navigate to Robinhood’s price chart for ETH, which contains an additional link to «Register to buy Ethereum.» The same link is provided for BTC. However, neither party has disclosed the details of the partnership between Twitter and Robinhood.

The integration of the price chart on Twitter could lead to an increase in traffic to Robinhood — according to BitInfoCharts, users tweet about #Bitcoin alone about 120,000 times a day. Mentions of #Ethereum fluctuate around 25,000 daily tweets.

In early December, rumors began to circulate that Twitter might create its own cryptocurrency, Twitter Coin, to be used for payments on the platform. This came a week after Musk shared his vision of what Twitter 2.0 might look like — including the integration of cryptocurrency-based payments.