Twitter’s dollar-sign tags for stocks and currencies are called cashtags. A cashtag places a dollar sign before a ticker symbol, such as $XRX, allowing a platform to recognize the text as a financial symbol and connect users with related market discussions.
The convention grew out of online finance communities rather than originating as a standard hashtag. StockTwits used dollar-prefixed ticker symbols in 2009, and Twitter later adopted the format officially in 2012. Twitter’s system made these symbols clickable and useful for tracking conversations about publicly traded companies.
Cashtags are often confused with ordinary hashtags because both use a special leading character and help organize social-media content. Their purposes differ: a hashtag normally labels a topic or phrase with #, while a cashtag identifies a stock, exchange-traded asset, or sometimes a currency with $. The same dollar-sign convention can also appear in services such as Cash App, where it may identify a username rather than a market instrument.