FTX CEO Proposes A Decentralized Twitter ⋆ ZyCrypto

• Elon Musk’s proposed Twitter purchase has raised concerns around centralization.
• SBF has proposed a decentralized model hosted on the blockchain.
• SBF’s model would allow users to have and moderate their UI.

FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, SBF has proposed a decentralized model for Twitter. SBF’s proposal comes moments after Musk revealed he had made a bid for the social media company.

Users Would Be Able To Create Their UI 

The internet and crypto markets are currently buzzing following the revelation of  Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter. In a tweet on Thursday, the world’s richest man revealed that he has offered to purchase Twitter for $54.20 per share, a bid of about $43 billion.

It follows the billionaire’s decision to become the company’s largest shareholder. However, there are concerns that Elon Musk privatizing the popular microblogging platform with over 250 million users would lead to too much centralization of power and be antithetical to free speech for a place Musk has described as “the de facto public town square.”

Responding to these concerns, the CEO of FTX, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges, Sam Bankman-Fried, has suggested a decentralized model for the platform. SBF proposes that tweets should be hosted on the blockchain, with users deciding who accesses them, also adding that the platform monetizes with tweets and its UI.

On monetization, the crypto executive proposes that users pay $0.01 per tweet, adding that they could use the UI to monetize and subsidize. The UI monetizing would include the inclusion of ads, and subsidizing would be using ad revenues to pay network fees. However, one of the more exciting features SBF talks about in his model is the ability of users to create and moderate their UI by taking advantage of blockchain technology.

“Because the messages would be on-chain, users would control their data. This means that anyone could build their own Twitter UI!” Said SBF in his tweet, adding, “Their UI would be able to pull the same underlying messages, and compose seamlessly with them. The UIs could grow out the ecosystem, and monetize through UI fees–or subsidize. Each UI could have its own moderation policy–no longer one person/company controlling speech.”

The Effect On Layer 1 Protocols, Impacts On Twitter’s Bottom Line, And The Difficulty

SBF believes that this move would also have a net positive effect on Layer 1 protocols. According to SBF, hosting nearly half a billion tweets in the blockchain daily would make it necessary for these networks to improve their scalability in terms of TPS. The tweet read, “This would force some L1 to scale to hundreds of thousands of TPS, if not millions, if likes/RTs were also on-chain. But honestly, that’s something that has to happen eventually anyway.”

While SBF remains on the fence on the impact his proposed model would have on the company’s revenue, he expects that his model will solve issues around moderation, centralization, and transparency. SBF revealed that while it was no easy undertaking, it was not impossible and could swiftly be implemented with the right demand.