Twitter creator and CEO Jack Dorsey has announced his intentions to move Twitter into blockchain.
In a series of tweets, Dorsey revealed he has set up a new team called BlueSky dedicated to creating an open, decentralised standard for social media.
“Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open-source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralised standard for social media,” he wrote.
“The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.”
Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. 🧵
— jack (@jack) December 11, 2019
It has been well documented that the Twitter CEO is a long-time enthusiast for both Bitcoin and decentralised technologies.
Earlier this year, Coin Rivet reported on the news that Dorsey had been purchasing $10,000 worth of Bitcoin per week.
Decentralised internet standard
When Twitter first gained mainstream adoption, Dorsey says it was “so open” that many saw the potential for it to be a “decentralised internet standard”.
However, for several reasons – which the CEO notes were “all reasonable at the time” – the development team took a different path and increasingly centralised the platform.
While some may question the benefit of moving an already established and successful project to decentralised technologies, Dorsey argues: “It will allow us to access and contribute to a much larger corpus of public conversation, focus our efforts on building open recommended algorithms which promote healthy conversation, and will force us to be far more innovative than in the past.”
He anticipates the project will take many years to develop and ensure it is both usable and scalable.
Chief technology officer Parag Agrawal will head BlueSky and will be in charge of hiring and directing the team.
Interested in reading more Jack Dorsey-related stories? Discover more about the Twitter CEO slamming Libra and completely dismissing the project.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author should not be considered as financial advice. We do not give advice on financial products.