X Corp continues its march towards Elon Musk's "everything app" dream by securing the money transmitter license in Utah, which brings the company to fifteen U.S. states that have issued the money transmitter license to X.

X had been gathering money transmitter licenses in the past months to prepare the first peer-to-peer payments phase to launch within the app.

A money transmitter license would grant the business the right to allow senders and recipients to transfer funds, and the next step from that would be payment processor licensing, which is necessary if X wants to enable in-stream shopping directly.

But money transmitter approval will help in the first step, in the building of a peer-to-peer payment network, though X still has a long way to go before such functionality is fully realized, beginning with full approvals from each U.S. state.

Which could take time, a point that Elon has also conceded.

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And that's before even receiving international permits for transactions, which, as Meta learned, are unnecessarily complex in the best of times and impossible in others.

But X needs to start sometime, and with the company last month presenting a blueprint to support complete payments and banking capabilities within the X platform by the end of 2024, it needs to get moving if it is going to meet its lofty ambitions.

Which, as noted, aligns with Musk's broader x.com vision, which Elon remains optimistic will happen sometime soon.

Though again, that is tinged with Elon's customary optimism, which at times borders on blatant fantasy.

At a company all-hands meeting last October, Musk told X employees that he expects X Corp to receive approval by all 50 U.S. states as a money transmitter within "the next few months", but also stated: "it would blow my mind if we don't have [payments] rolled out by the end of next year.".

This is a rather ambitious goal, but again, as a first step, it might be the case that X will soon be able to unleash the first elements of peer-to-peer payments, which could open up a whole range of new opportunities in the app.

Musk's X vision, which he and former business partner David Sacks founded when they collaborated at PayPal back in 1999, integrates payments at its core and radiates into all other areas. Musk and Sacks had sketched an early plan to create a one-stop-shop that would be a platform from where any financial transaction, whether it was the payment of a bill, banking, shopping, or anything else, would be possible. That app, which even in 1999 Elon insisted would be called x.com, would then, at least theory, become the backbone of modern society, by taking a new approach to online interactions that essentially eliminated the need for banks, loans under traditional structures, etc.

Musk is still holding firm to that vision, with payments being the first small step towards a wider offering.

If X can make it happen.

Meta has been investing for years to develop Facebook Pay, now renamed Meta Pay, into a full-fledged payments product, with only modest success to date.
Meta also once hired a former PayPal executive for its efforts on this side, in the form of David Marcus, who headed the development of the Libra internal payment system that Meta launched in 2019 with the high-profile support of a number of major financial partners.
But by the time questions began to be asked about the plan quickly soured enthusiasm for a separate in-app payments network powered by a corporate U.S. entity. Indeed, many regions came straight out and said that they would not support the company creating its own currency and it was here that public backlash saw many of the initial big-name backers pull out, including Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal, all key names that had lent credibility to the initial concept.

Meta has also experimented with other paths for its payment products, testing and shutting down Meta Pay separately in multiple geographies. It is still determining the best path forward for the system, but skepticism surrounding the company's motives and alternative payment options continue to restrain its ability to build meaningful in-stream payments muscle.

Which is what X will also have to deal with. And while many point to Musk's experience with PayPal as key in X's favor, again, Meta also had a PayPal leader over its largest payments project and still was not able to make it work within the modern regulatory environment.

There is quite a lot to consider here, and maybe, just maybe, Elon will prove to have some advantage, in some respects, that will see X payments gain more traction than Meta could.

But again. I would suggest that X is being overly optimistic, both in its launch targets, and the potential take-up of its payments offering, if/when it does gain full approval.