X hires former Aave chief product officer and Base design lead Benji Taylor as head of design, as the company prepares to roll out its X Money payments product. Elon Musk’s X has hired crypto-native product designer Benji Taylor as its new head of design, ahead of a wider rollout of the platform’s X Money payments product next month. Taylor announced the move on X on Wednesday, saying he was “honoured” to join the company and looking forward to working closely with Musk and X’s head of product Nikita Bier. Taylor’s crypto-native background is notable, previously founding Los Feliz Engineering, a consumer software studio that was acquired by decentralized lending protocol Aave Labs in 2023. Bier said that he had followed Taylor’s work for years and knew that he was “on track to become one of the best designers in the world,” and that X was “finally teaming up and building the greatest design team in the industry.” Read more
Elon Musk added that “triple-digit” economic growth could even be possible by 2030; however, some Bitcoiners worry about a 2026 bear market. The Bitcoin community is hopeful for the cryptocurrency to again rally after billionaire Elon Musk predicted that the US economy could experience significant growth by December 2026 at the earliest. “Double-digit growth is coming within 12 to 18 months,” Musk said in an X post on Tuesday, “If applied intelligence is proxy for economic growth, which it should be, triple-digit is possible in ~5 years.” Bitcoiners often look to macroeconomic signals, from growth forecasts to central bank policy, as clues for how broader economic trends could impact Bitcoin’s (BTC) price. Read more
Elon Musk’s viral comments on Bitcoin’s intrinsic ties to energy and physics signal a changing attitude toward Bitcoin from Tesla’s founder. Elon Musk’s ambitious goals of tackling excess spending and inefficiencies in the US federal government may have been futile, but it might have been the catalyst for his changing tune on Bitcoin. Batten clarified that Bitcoin’s energy use comes directly from mining, not through individual transactions, which he described as ‘critically important to understand’ because the network can theoretically process thousands more transactions without needing to expend more energy. “The moment you have this per-transaction metric, it suggests something very insidious, which is, it’s unscalable because as you scale more, then energy use is going to go up as well. And a lot of regulators in Europe still believe that,” Batten said. Read more