Elon Musk, Twitter, Dogecoin, Bluesky and the decentralized social media race

Elon actually did it. Crypto Twitter’s merry fool king – whose tweets about Dogecoin have repeatedly moved the price, his July 2018 “pedo dude” tweet about a British cave diver got him on trial for defamation (he won), his “funding secured” tweet August 2018 led to SEC securities fraud allegations ($20 million fine) – now owns Twitter Inc.

When this story began six months ago (!) with Musk’s original $44 billion offer, I wrote, “Musk probably won’t be able to buy Twitter.” I was wrong the first time; the second is still unanswered, heats up but up quickly.

Musk originally said both publicly and in private (since leaked) text messages that he aimed to bring Twitter on-chain and make it open source, accept Dogecoin for payments for Twitter services, and track crypto spam bots .

But then, in texts with a representative of FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, Musk wrote: “Blockchain Twitter is not possible. The bandwidth and latency requirements cannot be supported by a peer-to-peer network unless those ‘peers’ are absolutely gigantic, defeating the purpose of a decentralized network.”

And yet! Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, backed Musk’s $500 million outright purchase and “is forming an internal team focused on how blockchain and crypto could help Twitter,” the company told Decrypt on Friday . Binance thinks it has Musk’s ear. If that isn’t enough crypto influence, Andreessen Horowitz is also involved.

Regardless of your take on Musk, anyone who believes in the future viability of crypto and blockchain solutions and wants to see more mass adoption should be excited to see what happens next.

Twitter users who loudly rail against his possession and threaten to leave will usually not leave. The irony is that if they do, many of their other options now have a crypto connection as well.

Facebook is so committed to the Metaverse that it rebranded its company as Meta, and even after its Metaverse division, Reality Labs, lost $3.6 billion in the third quarter and the stock plummeted more than 25%, it still needs to adjust its strategy double. It’s unclear how much of Meta’s Metaversum will use crypto and blockchain, but remember that the company has attempted to create its own cryptocurrency before.

Jack Dorsey, a Musk confidant who might advise him on what to do at Twitter, left Twitter to focus on Block, formerly Square, which, like Facebook, was as keen on its commitment to a new area of ​​technology to prove publicly that it changed its company name. But Dorsey’s separate “decentralized social media” project, Bluesky — born within Twitter and now independent — has just launched a website for his AT protocol (it stands for Authenticated Transport) and opened the waitlist for his Bluesky app, which does that Team as a “browser” to access the AT protocol.

Bluesky is following Dorsey’s vision of Twitter as a protocol – just don’t call it blockchain (or Web3, since Dorsey doesn’t believe in it).

This article uses the word “blockchain” 7 times and describes the @at_protocol as “blockchain-based social media platform”, but please take a closer look at our design: There is no blockchain. https://t.co/5KiDOyn9i4

— Jay Graber (@arcalinea) October 20, 2022

Discord has withdrawn from crypto wallet integration due to player outrage, but remains the most popular home for DAOs, the crypto organizations based on community voting.

Mastodon, a “decentralized social media platform” launched in 2016 and using a network of open-source servers, gained 30,000 new signups on the day Musk bought Twitter. Aave, the original DeFi lender, launched its Lens Protocol, a “Web3, Smart Contracts-based social chart,” in February.

Even Kanye West is in on it with Parler, the right-wing social media app he’s buying. Parler launched an NFT marketplace called DeepRedSky in March, which debuted with a Trump NFT collection. Kanye himself has praised Bitcoin and was recently spotted wearing a Satoshi Nakamoto hat.

While some of these apps I’ve listed would say have nothing to do with crypto, it’s striking that so many social media platforms are betting on decentralization, the crypto industry’s utopian rallying cry, to improve their UX or to promote freedom of expression. I see it as another mainstream hint of adoption — similar to the moves BlackRock, Google, and BNY Mellon have made this month — that critics are absent while pointing to the coins’ low prices.

I first wrote about bitcoin in 2011, and what excited me most at the time was the ability to use crypto to pay for a paywalled news article without the friction of entering your credit card information and subscribing for a full year . Similarly, what if the crypto and blockchain “killer app” ends up being a better social media marketplace?

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