Remember when Twitter ditched NFTs and enabled Bitcoin tips? Given that Jack Dorsey’s founder and CEO Twitter bio it’s literally just “#bitcoin,” it’s no surprise that Twitter is interested in cryptocurrencies and other decentralized technologies. Today, Twitter said it is officially launching a crypto team, which will aim to be “a center of excellence for all things blockchain and web3,” the company told TechCrunch.
To begin, this team will explore crypto payments (Bitcoin tips, crypto payments for ticketed spaces), creator monetization opportunities (NFT tools), and social media decentralization (part of the overall move to Web3). . According to a tweet from Tess Rinearson, the engineer tapped to lead the team, Twitter Crypto wants to “help push the boundaries of what’s possible with identity, community, ownership and more.”
Although crypto payments and NFT Galleries are the lowest-hanging fruit in the short term, the move marks a broader push by Twitter to decentralize social media, which would allow networks to run independently on the blockchain, rather than on servers hosted by businesses, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). The idea is that these decentralized networks will give individual users more say over their data and privacy. However, some researchers worry about how these decentralized systems will account for issues of content moderation, especially as it relates to extremist political content.
Twitter Crypto will work closely with a fledgling Twitter-sponsored initiative called bluesky, which aims to build a “decentralized open standard for social media.” In the same way that no bank controls cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum, there would be no social network that controls the bluesky protocol, even though its development is led by Twitter.
Twitter is not the only major social platform exploring blockchain technology. Just this week, Discord founder and CEO Jason Citron hinted in a tweet that Discord is working on an integration with MetaMask, a popular crypto wallet service. Meanwhile, Reddit is hiring engineers for an NFT platform.
