Elon actually did. Crypto Twitter’s merry fool king – whose tweets about Dogecoin have repeatedly moved the price, whose July 2018 “pedo dude” tweet about a British cave diver got him on trial for defamation (he won), whose August 2018 tweet “the Funding Secured” led to SEC securities fraud allegations ($20 million fine) – now owner of 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. But crypto advocates should cheer him on if they ever want Twitter to really embrace crypto tools.” .” I was wrong the first time; the second question is still unanswered, but it’s getting hot fast.
Musk originally said both publicly and in private (now leaked) text messages that he intends to on-chain and open source Twitter, accept Dogecoin for payments for Twitter services, and fight 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 gargantuan.” , 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 “assembling an internal team focused on how blockchain and crypto could help Twitter,” the company told Friday decrypt. Binance thinks it has Musk’s ear. If that’s not 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 desires more mass adoption should be excited to see what happens next.
Twitter users who have been vocal about his ownership and threatening to leave the company, for the most part, won’t leave. The irony is that many of their other options now also have a crypto connection, if that’s the case.
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 has to company redoubling its strategy. It’s unclear how much Metaverse of Meta will use crypto and blockchain, but keep in mind that the company has attempted to create its own cryptocurrency before.
Jack Dorsey, a Musk confidant who could advise him on what to do on Twitter, left Twitter and focused on Block, formerly Square, which, like Facebook, was so keen to publicly prove its commitment to a new area of technology that it changed its company name. But Dorsey’s separate “decentralized social media” project, Bluesky — formed within Twitter and now independent — just launched a website for his AT protocol (it stands for Authenticated Transport) and opened the waitlist for his Bluesky app, which 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).
Discord has refrained from integrating crypto wallets due to player outrage, but remains the favorite home for DAOs, the crypto organizations based on community voting.
Mastodon, a “decentralized social media platform” launched in 2016 that uses a network of open-source servers, saw 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 graph,” in February.
Even Kanye West is meddling with Parler, the right-wing social media app he buys. 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 considering decentralization, the crypto industry’s utopian buzzword, to promote their Improve UX or promote free speech. I consider it another mainstream indication of adoption – similar to the moves BlackRock, Google and BNY Mellon have taken this month – that critics are missing 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 cryptocurrencies to pay for a paywalled news article without the hassle of entering credit card information and subscribing for a full year. Similarly, what if the crypto and blockchain “killer app” ended up being a better social media marketplace?
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