Elon Musk Eyes Withdrawing X From EU, Will This Impact Crypto Market?

Yuri Molchan

Tech billionaire considers leaving European audience without access to biggest crypto blogging platform X over local regulation issue

According to an article published by Business Insider, tech innovator and billionaire Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter for $44 billion last October and made a full rebranding of it into X, is considering cutting off the platform’s European audience from its user base.

In a similar way, Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have blocked access to their new product, Threads (believed to be a clone of Twitter by many, including Musk), in the same region and for the same reason — being unable to comply with the local regulation, the Digital Services Act (DSA).

Musk may be forced to drive X out of Europe

The latter requires such platforms to implement heavy content moderation and remove any information that could be false, misleading or harmful for some of its consumers.

Currently, the geopolitical situation on the Middle East on the X app seems to be surrounded by a great deal of misinformation, so X may have already violated the newly implemented regulation in Europe.

Last week, the chief of the European Commission stated that X app’s compliance was officially under investigation regarding the new law. It had made a formal request to X app to get detailed information to keep the platform clean of “harmful or toxic information.” If violations are revealed on behalf of Elon Musk’s company, X app may face a fine of as high as 6% of its global revenue.

According to sources familiar with the matter, upon purchasing the app in October last year, Musk suggested limiting the use of the platform to the U.S. only in order to cut costs for X. This would have drastically limited access to the popular social media platform.

For the same reason, Musk laid off several thousand staffers from international teams to bring costs down. He ordered the international offices of Twitter shut down — in Africa, South Korea, Australia, Paris, Berlin and Madrid.

Global crypto community loves X app

X app is important for the crypto community since every single day hundreds of thousands of tweets are published dedicated to Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Dogecoin and other big and small-ranked digital currencies. Posts published on X platform can often play a major role in impacting the prices of crypto as news spreads very fast on X. Besides, all crypto influencers, heads of exchanges and blockchain platforms, such as Mike Novogratz, Vitalik Buterin, the Ripple CEO and Elon Musk himself publish on X app on a daily basis. Therefore, the importance of X for the global community, including Europe, is hard to overestimate.

Certainly, the potential loss of the European audience would hardly cause any great harm to the crypto market. Still, quite a lot of crypto users would be forced to begin using the X app in a much less comfortable way — via VPN.

Besides, some crypto exchanges were based in Europe initially, such as Bitstamp, having local licenses, and now Coinbase seeks to set up an office in Europe since it is facing trouble from U.S. regulators amid a lack of clear regulations.

Coinbase picks Ireland as EU’s regulatory crypto hub

Coinbase has chosen Ireland as Europe’s crypto regulatory hub. It has had an office there since 2018 with around a hundred people working there permanently. Now, the leading U.S. crypto exchange intends to receive a MiCA (Markets in Crypto Assets) license for an expanded range of operations in the European Union.

Once Coinbase secures this license, it will be allowed to offer its services in other European countries, such as Italy, France, Germany and others. It will also be able to easier release new products in those countries and will not be required to secure a license in each of them individually.

The total population of the European Union adds up to around 450 million people; this provides an enormous market for Coinbase to tap in the near future.

About the author

Yuri Molchan