Twitter: A Web3 Company?
Many months of ongoing legal dialogue have left us with none other than Elon Musk as the new “Chief Twit” of Twitter. Musk closed the $44 billion deal Thursday night (10/27), has displaced many top-level executives, and is taking the company private.
There is now much buzz regarding Musk’s (both short and long-term) plans for the platform. Specifically, will Twitter become a Web3 company? What might this even entail? Binance, the world’s largest digital-asset exchange, already committed $500 million to Musk’s financing for this deal in May and is allegedly already composing a team focused on exploring how crypto could be useful to Twitter. It is too early to make any confident claims. All there is to do at the moment is speculate. But that’s exciting, right?
Here are 4 ways Web3 technology and Twitter may become more interlaced:
1. Before closing the deal, Twitter had already announced the intent to implement “NFT Tweet Tiles.” This feature will allow an enlarged view of NFTs alongside their basic properties (title, creator, etc). Reddit has recently unveiled its NFT marketplace which allows users to purchase
NFTs on the platform. If this is any indication of where this space is heading, you can imagine Musk will integrate something similar or even more complex.
2. What better way to integrate Twitter into the Web3 ecosystem than to modify it to incorporate digital assets? Musk recently weighed in on the practicality of integrating a peer-to-peer payment structure into Twitter. This would significantly ease sending money back and forth, with or without cryptocurrency. Twitter already has a bitcoin tipping feature
available for US and El Salvador users using the Lightning Network. Musk has already indicated eagerness toward turning Twitter into a “super app” such as China’s WeChat that can handle many digital assets. Permitting more cryptocurrencies for tipping could be the first step in that direction.
3. One of Musk’s largest concerns, which put his acquisition on hold for many months, is the sheer amount of spam accounts on the platform. Twitter’s previous ownership estimated these accounts compose 5% of active users. Spam accounts often attempt to impersonate well-known figures such as Elon Musk himself to promote scams involving fake crypto giveaways. Blockchain-based identity verification mechanisms (such as NFT passports) could become viable solutions for authenticating all real users to mitigate the risk of scams.
4. Another change we might see under new ownership is the complete elimination of censorship on the platform. We have seen Twitter exercise its power to assign life-long bans to certain users. A potential solution might be that Twitter implements a token-based voting system. This would allow users to have increased influence over changes on the platform. It is,
however, important to keep in mind that the increased use of digital assets in such a way will concentrate Musk’s influence over a space that many desire to be as decentralized as possible. This could, however, be a viable solution to this particular issue.
While changing the Twitter ecosystem to incorporate these Web3 components would be quite the endeavor for the platform, the new ownership opens up new horizons for them to truly become the future of the platform.
Written by Ryan Young
