By Sheila Dang

(Reuters) -Twitter Inc will allow people to tip their favorite content creators with bitcoin and will launch a fund to pay some users who host audio chat rooms on its Spaces feature, the company said on Thursday.

San Francisco-based Twitter Inc said it would test new methods to make users’ experience safer on Twitter (NYSE.). These include warning people when someone is entering into a heated discussion or permitting them to post in threads.

Twitter announced the product in an effort to rival Alphabet and Facebook (NASDAQ) respectively. It also plans to improve its reputation as a platform where heated debates can flourish.

All Twitter users worldwide can now make and receive payments digitally using their iOS devices. A small number of test accounts were previously allowed.

Esther Crawford from Twitter’s product lead for creator and monetization, said, “We think we can continue incentivizing the kinds of conversations that people wish to see.”

Twitter stated that authentication will be available for NFTs or non-fungible tokens. These are digital assets, such as videos or images, that can exist on a Blockchain.

Twitter will now allow people to identify and display their NFT ownership via the feature, it said.

Twitter is launching a creator fund that will provide marketing, financial and technical support for Spaces hosts who are involved in recurring audio programming.

Andre Jean-Pierre was a Spaces beta-tester and said that such support would allow Spaces hosts to have better conversations, as well as potentially securing brand sponsorship deals.

Twitter stated that it was exploring ways to let users filter out words from their replies, which might be useful to prevent abusive speech or name calling.