Is Charles Hoskinson really upto creating a decentralized ‘Twitter’?

Cardano founder has put his thoughts on the matter following Elon Musk’s tweet about the Twitter acquisition.

Amidst the turmoil on Twitter and its shareholding race and a related bit of controversy, another news broke out that has made the ongoing gossip in another direction. This has come from Charles Hoskinson, Cardano blockchain network founder, who offered and claimed to build a decentralized version of the social media giant Twitter.

Charles Hoskinson replied to Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk that he’s happy to help him build Twitter’s decentralized version if his offer gets rejected. The offer from Cardano’s founder came after an unsolicited offer from the world’s top billionaire to the Twitter acquisition. For that, he would be ready to pay a huge $43 billion to get full control of the social media platform giant. 

Elon Musk has made this announcement by sharing SEC filings in his Twitter thread where he had wished to fully acquire Twitter for a total cash consideration of about $43 billion. Clarifying his intention, he said that he doubts popular social media platforms not to follow his commitments to safeguarding, protecting and making private free speech. 

Both Elon Musk and Charles Hoskinson have received responses in huge amounts; some were criticizing, mocking and supporting the ideas. Till the time of Musk’s wish to acquire Twitter, he was the largest shareholder in the company with 9.2% of the shares. But later, investment management company Vanguard Group increased its shareholding in Twitter from 8.39% to 10.3%. Earlier the management firm was the second top shareholder, becoming the topmost, beating Musk. 

Several other shareholders also reacted to Musk’s action and took some actions, for instance, rejecting Tesla’s CEO offer, being a board member or increasing the amount of their shareholding. Such as Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud, another member of the board, rejected the offer and increased his shareholding upto 5.2%. 

Reactions of the crypto community were also worth noting, especially about Charles Hoskinson’s offer where people take an example of his earlier project and assume that the decentralized version of Twitter which Cardano founder is talking about, will take time of more than five years. 

Like the founder of Telos blockchain, Douglas Horn, some others predicted that the project won’t be ready until 2035. While others have assumed that it would also face the scalability issues as Hoskinson’s other projects, like the Cardano network, are facing. They noted that despite deploying smart contracts on the blockchain network, Cardano faced scalability and congestion issues that made its performance below expectations compared to other smart contract networks. 

However, the thought was not completely rejected or mocked by people. Some praised the thought and counted several advantages of doing so. For instance, the founder of FTX, Sam-Bankman Fried, said that the web three technology could be used to monetize the social media platform created to allow users to moderate their community, taking off the pressure from the company to ban or leave. 

FTX founder also noted that on the decentralized version, the Tweets would be private, encrypted where users could decide by themselves having authority to show their posts. He said it would also boost the current efforts to carry on the cryptocurrencies and digital assets on the platform. 

Nancy J. Allen is a crypto enthusiast and believes that cryptocurrencies inspire people to be their own banks and step aside from traditional monetary exchange systems. She is also intrigued by blockchain technology and its functioning.

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