Bluesky, a project funded by Twitter to build a decentralised standard for social media, has stated that the company is not controlled by the company following Elon Musk's purchase.
Back in late 2019, when Jack Dorsey was still CEO of Twitter, he set in motion a plan to "develop an open and decentralized standard for social media" that would explore elements of crypto and Web3.
That effort, which came to be called "bluesky,"
gained steam in 2021 with a January "ecosystem review" of
decentralized social apps and the August appointment of Zcash veteran developer
Jay Graber as its lead.
Today, bluesky took to Twitter—the platform soon to be
privately owned by mega-billionaire Elon Musk—to clarify that it's independent
of the social media site and has been a public benefit limited liability
company since February.
"The 'public benefit' part of our structure gives us
the freedom to put our resources towards our mission without an obligation to
return money to shareholders," it tweeted. "The company is owned by
the team itself, without any controlling stake held by Twitter."
According to bluesky, where Dorsey remains a board member,
it has $13 million in funding "to ensure we have the freedom and
independence to get started on R&D."
In other words, it's somewhat beyond Musk's reach, even
though the Tesla CEO just paid $44 billion for Twitter and has plans to improve
it—from removing spam and minimizing content moderation to potentially
introducing crypto payments.
Bluesky has taken inspiration from a number of crypto
projects, including IPFS—a protocol that allows for peer-to-peer file
sharing—to the Basic Attention Token that incentivizes Brave browser readers to
watch ads.
Given the surge of interest in Twitter's future, we thought this would be a good time to clarify the relationship between Bluesky and Twitter.
— bluesky (@bluesky) April 25, 2022
Dorsey, however, is a Bitcoin maximalist. Now focused solely
on leading payments company Block, Dorsey has overseen Cash App's incorporation
of Bitcoin purchases and greenlit a decentralized exchange that uses Bitcoin,
not Ethereum or other smart contract-enabled blockchains. The company is also
developing Bitcoin mining rigs.
By contrast, Musk, though he cozied up to Bitcoin when Tesla
bought $1.5 billion in BTC for its books, is more enamored of Dogecoin. He's
been working with that blockchain's part-time developers to make it into a
payment network that surpasses Bitcoin.
But bluesky's message today is clear. It will "work
towards our vision of a durable protocol for public conversation no matter what
happens." Or who's in charge.
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