Twitter is building a crypto team – TechCrunch

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Remember when Twitter ditched NFTs and activated Bitcoin cheats? Given that founder and CEO Jack Dorsey’s Twitter biography is literally just “#bitcoin,” it’s no surprise that Twitter is interested in cryptocurrency and other decentralized technologies. Today, Twitter announced that it is officially launching a crypto team, which will aim to be “a center of excellence for all things blockchain and web3,” the company told TechCrunch.

For starters, this team will explore crypto payments (Bitcoin tips, crypto payments for ticket spaces), creator monetization opportunities (NFT tools), and social media decentralization (part of the general move towards Web3). According to a Twitter feed from Tess Rinearson, the engineer responsible for leading the team, Twitter Crypto wants to “help push the boundaries of what is possible with identity, community, ownership and more.”

As I build the team, we’ll work to understand what crypto can do for Twitter, as well as what Twitter can do for crypto. Twitter really does ‘get’ crypto (hello bitcoin tips and NFTs!), But there is so much more to explore here.

– Tess Rinearson (@_tessr) November 10, 2021

Although crypto payments and NFT galleries are the lowest fruit in the short term, the move marks Twitter’s broader push towards social media decentralization, which would allow networks to operate independently on the blockchain, rather than on servers hosted by companies, like Amazon. Web Services (AWS). The idea is that these decentralized networks will give individual users more say over their data and privacy. Still, some researchers are concerned about how these decentralized systems would take into account content moderation issues, especially when it comes to extremist political content.

Twitter Crypto will work closely with an emerging Twitter-sponsored initiative called bluesky, which aims to create an “open and decentralized standard for social media.” In the same way that no bank controls cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum, there would not be a single social network that controls the bluesky protocol, even if its development is driven by Twitter.

Twitter isn’t the only major social platform exploring blockchain technology. Just this week, Discord founder and CEO Jason Citron hinted in a tweet that Discord is working on an integration with MetaMask, a popular crypto wallet service. Meanwhile, Reddit is recruiting engineers for an NFT platform.

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