Elon Musk’s offer to take Twitter private with a bid of $54.20 a share, about $43 billion in total, has attracted tremendous reaction on the social media platform. Only hours after the news broke, Justin Sun, founder of Tron network, made an offer of $60 per share, trying to outbid the Tesla CEO, and claimed he would bring Twitter to be a decentralized web3 platform.
FTX’s CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) also commented on Musk’s tweet, explaining what a decentralized Twitter may look like and adding that FTX would like to be part of the project if there is sufficient demand for making Twitter on-chain.
- SBF said once Twitter goes on-chain, everything will be encrypted; meanwhile, tweets will be like DMs with a privacy setting on, as senders can choose who can access them.
- There would be two forms of monetization, tweeted SBF, as 1) Twitter charging a small fraction of fees for each message and 2) the User Interface(UI) – showing advertisements to subsidize the network fee.
2) Tweets go on-chain, encrypted; the sender chooses who has access to them (i.e. who can decrypt). In some sense this unifies DMs and tweets–DMs are just tweets with the privacy setting of “only Jill”.
— SBF (@SBF_FTX) April 14, 2022
- He also suggested that each UI would establish its own set of moderation policies, ensuring that no individuals or entities can control the speech on the platform.
- Since the social media would be on-chain, he said naturally, Twitter would include NFTs, digital avatars, on-chain transactions, and Dogecoin on its platform.
- However, such a transformation would be an uneasy task to resolve, SBF admitted. Only some layer 1 base chains that scale to hundreds of thousands of TPS would be able to process the amount of information on Twitter. In addition, low transaction fees are key as well.
- With these added new features, SBF believes a decentralized Twitter can still maintain a yearly profit of around $300M and will turn the platform to be democratic and financially transparent.
- Justin Sun, trying to bid against Elon Musk, claimed he would turn Twitter into a decentralized open-source framework, and move it offshore, making it less US-centric through workforce decentralization.
