When Jack Dorsey was still the CEO of Twitter in late 2019, he acted on a plan to create an open and decentralized standard for social media that would include crypto and Web3 features.
With a January “ecosystem study” of decentralized social applications and the August hiring of Zcash veteran developer Jay Graber as its lead, that endeavor, dubbed as bluesky, gathered traction in 2021.
Twitter announcement
Today, bluesky took to Twitter — the platform that will soon be privately owned by billionaire Elon Musk — to stress that it is completely independent of the social media platform and has been operating as a public benefit limited liability company since February.
In a Twitter post, bluesky emphasized that this is an opportune time to clarify its relationship with the social media platform, adding that it’s structure’s structure’s ‘public benefit’ component allows it to direct its resources toward its objective without being obligated to repay money to shareholders.
Bluesky also stated that the team owns the firm outright, with no controlling position held by Twitter.
Out of Musk’s grasp
Dorsey, who remains a board member, said Bluesky has $13 million in capital to guarantee that they have the freedom and independence to get started on R&D.
In other words, it’s out of Musk’s grasp despite the fact that the Tesla CEO recently spent $44 billion for Twitter and has ambitions to enhance it, including deleting spam and reducing content filtering, as well as maybe integrating crypto payments.
Bluesky drew inspiration from a variety of crypto initiatives, including IPFS — a peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol — and the Basic Attention Token, which rewards Brave browser users for watching commercials.
Dorsey, on the other hand, is an ardent Bitcoin maximalist. Dorsey, who is now completely focused on running payments business Block, oversaw the integration of Bitcoin purchases into Cash App and approved the launch of a decentralized exchange that runs on Bitcoin, not Ethereum or other smart contract-enabled blockchains. Additionally, the business is producing Bitcoin mining machines.