• by Colin Kirkland , Yesterday

Moving ahead with his “everything app” vision, Elon Musk has announced new functionality for X’s private messaging feature, “XChat,” which he says involves “Bitcoin style encryption” powered by a company called Rust.

The feature, according to Musk will support “any kind of file” including in-app audio and video calls.

Available to beta testers since April, XChat was originally branded as an alternative to Twitter DMs and a competitor to popular encrypted messages apps like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram.

In 2022, shortly after Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X, he posted: “The goal of Twitter DMs is to superset Signal.”

However, Musk’s most recent commentary about XChat's upcoming functionality offsets this notion and makes it unclear, as a Bitcoin-adjacent architecture, by definition, would not be encrypted and therefore not a direct competitor with the aforementioned apps.

According to CoinDesk, “transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain are not encrypted…allowing total strangers to interact with the network.”

In response to Musk’s announcement, Ian Miers, assistant professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, posted on X that saying “Bitcoin style encryption” is equivalent to saying “we decided to run our rocket on water, since NASA uses Hydrogen and Oxygen.”

Regardless of what Musk means in his post, the company's Chat push is indicative of its long-term vision to become an “everything app” -- a concept derived from China's hugely successful app WeChat, which billions of people use to grocery shop, text, video conference, play video games, follow the news, and make digital payments.

“If you're in China, you kind of live on WeChat,” Musk has said. “It does everything -- sort of like Twitter, plus PayPal, plus a whole bunch of things, and all rolled into one, with a great interface. It's really an excellent app, and we don't have anything like that outside of China.”

In 2023, Musk, who co-founded PayPal, began securing licenses in the U.S. for digital payments and other financial services on X. Since then, the company has partnered with Visa for future payments in what Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino are calling “X Money.”

No official date has been announced for X Money, but at the start of 2025, Yaccarino stated that users should expect the feature to launch at some point this year.

For XChat, Musk says that all users can expect to gain access to the feature at some point this week, and that it will eventually replace the older direct-messaging system.