X’s promise of crypto trade buttons is at least its third since January

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• Nikita Bier said Tuesday that X will add buy and sell buttons for crypto inside posts, calling it a follow-on to Cashtags, the price-chart feature he built.
• He made a similar promise in January, and Cashtags shipped in April without in-app trade execution.
• Bier stepped down as X’s head of product on Aug. 5 and now holds the title in an advisory capacity only.

Nikita Bier said on Tuesday that X is close to adding buy and sell buttons for crypto directly inside posts. It is a promise X has now made, in some form, at least three times since January, and none of those earlier versions has yet turned into a working trade button.

Bier made the claim in a reply to a trader who accused him of having throttled Crypto Twitter’s visibility through algorithm changes.”Bull Market is allowed to commence because Nikita is no longer shadow banning CT,” the trader, who posts as pattchxbt, wrote.

January’s tease, April’s rollout

The trade buttons themselves are not new information. Bier first teased in-app crypto trading on Jan. 11, a day after crypto accounts accused him of burying their posts, saying a version could arrive “as early as February.”

February came and went. What actually shipped, on April 14, was Cashtags, X’s crypto and stock trading feature, for iPhone users in the US and Canada. It showed live price charts and let people search or paste token contract addresses. It did not let anyone trade.

Three days after that launch, Bier said as much himself: “X will not execute trades or act as a brokerage, but intends to build financial data tools and links.” Canadian users got a button that opened Wealthsimple, an outside brokerage, instead of a trade executed on X. Bier said Cashtags had “driven” roughly $1 billion in trading volume in its first few days, a figure that describes activity elsewhere, not orders filled on X.

He no longer runs the team that would build it

The bigger change since January is not the product. It is Bier’s job. He stepped down as X’s head of product on Aug. 5, after 13 months in the role, saying it was “time to pass the torch and demote myself to my natural state: a poster.” He stayed on as an adviser. Tuesday’s promise, in other words, came from someone no longer running the team that would have to ship it.

Bier’s reply also credited the crypto rally to the US Treasury, not to X. That part checks out only loosely. The Treasury did announce, in mid-August, that it would roughly double its bond buyback operations, to at least $4 billion per operation, starting Sept. 9. That is a routine bond-market liquidity move, not the scale of “debasing the dollar” his post implied.

Neither Bier nor X named a launch date on Tuesday. Whether trade buttons ship this time, and under whose product roadmap, is the open question the last seven months have not answered.