Twitter sets up crypto team to explore decentralized apps

Twitter starts a dedicated crypto team and thus marks the latest advance of CEO Jack Dorsey, digital assets and decentralized apps and the communities growing around them.

The social network has hired Tess Rinearson to lead the new Twitter Crypto team and "to define the strategy for the future of crypto in (and on) Twitter," said the Financial Times company.

Dorsey, a renowned Bitcoin enthusiast, has long said that he wants to integrate digital assets into the future of Twitter after successfully introducing Bitcoin support with the payment company Square two years ago.

In September, Twitter announced that it will introduce a new tool with which users can use Bitcoin to send tips on their content to others. It also means that it develops a function for checking non-fungible tokens (NFTS), digital collectibles that have gained popularity this year and that use some Twitter users as their profile images.

Under the direction of Twitters Chief Technology Officer Parag Agrawal, Rinearson has the task of monitoring and building this efforts, as well as an initiative for researching the decentralization of social media in the broader sense. Before that, she worked for crypto groups such as Interchain, a group that focuses on the development of decentralized open source technologies, and interstellar, a decentralized crypto wallet and exchange.

Nevertheless, experts have questioned whether such efforts have the potential to cannibalize the existing advertising-driven business model of Twitter, while some investors consider Dorsey's Bitcoin fixation as a distraction.

Last year Dorsey had to cancel a planned monthly trip to Africa to explore opportunities for cryptocurrencies after New York activist investor Elliott Management had requested his replacement as a CEO, citing corporate government concerns. Elliott and Twitter later concluded a deal that made Dorsey possible to stay at the top, on the condition that he achieved stricter performance goals.

But in Silicon Valley there is a growing enthusiasm for the web3 movement that wants to interfere with big-tech companies, store user data on central servers and want to monetize this data.

In the Web3 ecosystem, on the other hand, decentralized apps run on public blockchains, which means that data is not collected by a single party, while users can be offered token-based rewards for participation.

Several social platforms alongside Twitter, such as Reddit and Discord, have indicated that they are also looking for ways to integrate into decentralized apps and to transfer some of the concepts of Web3 to their platforms.

"Twitter gets crypto, and the early integration of bitcoin tips and NFT authentication shows this," said Rinearson. "There is so much more to discover to help people participate directly on Twitter in the promise of a developing, decentralized internet."

rinearson will also be part of Twitters Bluesky, an independent project that is financed by Twitter to find paths, especially social media. The working group, which is made up of Twitter employees and external experts, develops a single standard-or a protocol-on which social platforms and other developers can build tailor-made offers in order to make them interoperer.

In addition, developers could create a marketplace for moderation algorithms or filters in a time of intensive debates on how user -generated content should be moderated. However, the project has led to some skepticism, as experts indicate that it is unsustainable because it could affect Twitter's business model and it is unlikely that rival is becoming more important.