Twitter Sets Up Crypto Team To Explore Decentralized Applications

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Twitter is launching a dedicated crypto team, marking CEO Jack Dorsey’s latest push to embrace digital assets and decentralized applications and the burgeoning communities around them.

The social media company hired Tess Rinearson to lead the new Twitter Crypto team and “set the strategy for the future of crypto on (and on) Twitter,” he said.

Twitter Crypto is designed to be “a center of excellence for all things blockchain and web3,” he added, referring to the term given to the growing number of decentralized applications that run on blockchains public.

“We are exploring ways to integrate decentralized technologies into our products and infrastructure,” Twitter said, adding that in the short term it was exploring payments, ways for people creating content to earn crypto and “decentralization of social media”.

Dorsey, a renowned bitcoin enthusiast, has long said he wants to integrate digital assets into the future of Twitter, having successfully introduced support for bitcoin at the Square payments company he also runs, two years ago.

In September, Twitter announced the introduction of a new tool that will allow users to send tips to others for their content using Bitcoin. He also said he was creating a verification feature for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), digital collectibles that have exploded in popularity this year and that some Twitter users use as profile pictures.

Working under the direction of Twitter’s CTO, Parag Agrawal, Rinearson is responsible for overseeing and developing these efforts. She previously worked in crypto groups such as Interchain, a group focused on developing decentralized open source technologies, and Interstellar, a decentralized crypto wallet and exchange.

The appointment comes amid a growing buzz in Silicon Valley around the web3 movement, which seeks to disrupt large tech companies that store user data on central servers and seek to monetize that data.

In the web3 ecosystem, on the other hand, decentralized applications run on public blockchains, meaning that data is not collected by any party, while users can be offered token-based rewards for their participation.

Several social platforms alongside Twitter, such as Reddit and Discord, have hinted that they are also exploring ways to integrate with decentralized apps and adopt some of the concepts of web3 on their platforms.

“Twitter is getting the crypto, and its early integration of Bitcoin Tips and NFT authentication demonstrates it,” Rinearson said. “There is so much more to explore to help people participate in the promise of a scalable and decentralized Internet, right on Twitter.”

Rinearson will also be a part of Twitter’s Bluesky, an independent Twitter-funded project designed to find ways to decentralize social media in particular. The working group, made up of Twitter employees as well as external experts, is developing a single standard – or protocol – on which social platforms and other developers can build more personalized offers, in order to make them more interoperable.

On top of that, developers could then create a market for moderation algorithms or filters, at a time of intense debate over how user-generated content should be moderated. However, experts questioned whether such a system has the potential to cannibalize Twitter’s current advertising-driven business model.

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