It shouldn’t be a surprise that Twitter is building a crypto team especially given that the CEO Jack Dorsey has only #bitcoin on his Twitter bio. Recently twitter added bitcoin tips and they also have NFTs. Twitter has been interested in cryptocurrency and other decentralized technologies for a while now.
Yesterday Twitter announced that they are building a crypto team that will aim to be a center for excellence for all things related to Blockchain and Web3. The team will be tasked to explore crypto payments and opportunities for creators to monetize their content on the platform. They will also work on decentralized social media which is part of the general movement towards web3.
According to a Twitter thread 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, and ownership.
This is going to be Twitter's push towards decentralizing the platform and letting it run on a blockchain rather than on servers hosted by businesses. The idea is that this will give individual users more say over their data and privacy. Some researchers are still worried about how decentralized standards would work with content moderation. Because there is a lot of extremist and political content on Twitter.
Twitter crypto will work with a nascent Twitter-sponsored initiative called BlueSky which aims to build an “open decentralized standard for social media”. They aim to build a social network that is controlled by no one even though the development is being carried out by Twitter.
Twitter is not the only social media platform working to integrate crypto and blockchain technology into its platform. Earlier this week Discord founder and CEO Jason Citron tweeted that Discord is working closely with MetaMask a popular crypto wallet. Reddit is also hiring engineers for an NFT platform.
