Twitter To Move Platform To Blockchain: What Does This Mean For Users?

Jack Dorsey's fondness for Bitcoin has led him to pursue a Bitcoin future for Africa. Now, the Twitter CEO wants to use the technology behind the popular crypto to move the social media company to a "decentralized" platform.

On Wednesday, Dorsey tweeted that his company is funding a small team to develop a "decentralized standard for social media" with the ultimate goal of making Twitter a client of that standard while offering his rationale after a series of tweets.

Dorsey believes that a centralized solution for enforcing policies to address abuse and misinformation may cease to work overtime, and a more scalable solution would be a shared standard. Dorsey also said that the way social media incentives are structured right now is "focused on content and conversation that sparks controversy and outrage, rather than conversation which informs and promotes health."

And Dorsey deems that a switch to blockchain, which bestows control over a decentralized network, will lead to better dissemination of content, better governance and perhaps even monetization.

"Why is this good for Twitter? It will allow us to access and contribute to a much larger corpus of public conversation, focus our efforts on building open recommendation algorithms which promote healthy conversation, and will force us to be far more innovative than in the past," Dorsey tweeted.

It's an ambitious goal to transition to blockchain, especially for a small team of five people that isn't formed yet. The team that Dorsey called BlueSky will task Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal to recruit the team members.

Dorsey estimates that this initiative may take years to come to fruition and solve the problems he identified. "This isn't going to happen overnight. It will take many years to develop a sound, scalable, and usable decentralized standard for social media that paves the path to solving the challenges listed above. Our commitment is to fund this work to that point and beyond," he wrote on Twitter.

With cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin, Dorsey is also trying to solve some of the issues of the decentralized digital currency. He also formed a team to focus on making Bitcoin a reliable payment method.