Twitter Partners With eToro To Allow Users To Trade Crypto, Assets In Real-Time

Elon Musk-led Twitter has partnered with the social trading and investing platform eToro, rolling out a new feature through which users can invest in financial assets and access real-time prices of cryptocurrencies and stocks.

The new feature, which rolled out on Twitter Thursday, is an expansion of the platform's $Cashtags, which let users trade data even before the partnership. Launched in 2012, this has allowed users to interact with asset-related content by inserting a dollar sign in front of the ticker.

With the new feature, users can now view market charts on a wide range of financial instruments. Users can click on a button that says "View on eToro," which will take them through to the eToro website where they can buy and sell assets, CNBC reported.

"The partnership will cover $Cashtags representing a wide range of instruments on the eToro platform, from stocks and ETFs to crypto and commodities," eToro's press release noted.

eToro is an online brokerage founded in Israel in 2007. Besides buying and selling stocks and cryptocurrencies, the platform allows people to mimic the trading strategies of other users.

"Twitter has become a crucial part of the retail investing community – it's where millions of ordinary investors go every day to access financial news, share knowledge and converse," Yoni Assia, CEO and co-founder of eToro, said, as per the new release.

The use of $Cashtags has emerged as a growing trend in the financial discourse on Twitter. In the first three months of 2023, there were 498 million tweets discussing business and finance worldwide, with 65% of the tweets from users in the 18-34 age group only.

"We are pleased to partner with eToro to provide Twitter users with additional market insights and greater access to investment capabilities. Twitter will continue to invest in growing the #FinTwitter community," Chris Riedy, vice president of global sales and marketing at Twitter, said, according to the press release.

Pricing data for $Cashtags were added to financial Twitter in December 2022, with Musk regarding it as "one of the many product improvements" to develop the social media platform into a "super app," CoinDesk reported.

Since its launch, the feature has seen a sweeping adoption with more than 420 million searches for $Cashtags, eToro said in the release. On average, the social media platform sees 4.7 million $Cashtag searches in a single day. The most commonly used $Cashtags include $TSLA (Tesla), with $BTC (Bitcoin) ranking in the top five.

Currently, Twitter users are able to view real-time trading data from the markets-charting platform TradingView, but only on some index funds such as S&P 500 and shares of certain companies such as Tesla.

This collaboration marks a rare business partnership for Twitter since Musk acquired the company for $44 billion and took over as its CEO in October 2022. Since taking over the rein, Musk has laid off a majority of the staff worldwide and made significant structural changes in a bid to reduce costs and increase profitability.

The latest in the slew of changes introduced by Musk includes changing Twitter Inc.'s name to X Corp., which is said to be part of the plan to turn the platform into an "everything app," similar to China's WeChat.