Jack Dorsey's love affair with Bitcoin is expanding into a growing focus on building a decentralized, blockchain-based Web 3.0.
Jack Dorsey is driving Twitter further along the crypto adoption road, hiring an executive who will build a full crypto team.
The social media network's CEO has hired crypto industry veteran Tess Rinearson to build and lead a new Twitter Crypto team. The company said her goal will be to "set the strategy for the future of crypto at [and on] Twitter," according to the Financial Times.
Dorsey has been an aggressive supporter of Bitcoin. His payments firm, Square, invested $50 million in the cryptocurrency — and opened its Cash App to bitcoin with great success. In September, it announced a tool that would let users tip other Twitter users and another to verify NFTs, which are increasingly used as avatars.
A veteran of Cosmos Network developer Interchain's Tendermint blockchain platform and Stellar-focused wallet and decentralized exchange (DEX) Interstellar, Rinearson will be charged with furthering Dorsey's goal of integrating bitcoin into Twitter.
On her Twitter account, Rinearson said she would be "focused on crypto, blockchains, and other decentralized technologies — including and going beyond cryptocurrencies ... we'll be working to figure out what crypto can do for Twitter, as well as what Twitter can do for crypto. Twitter truly 'gets' crypto (hello Bitcoin tipping & NFTs!) but there's so much more to explore here."
She added that Crypto Twitter will "serve as a 'center of excellence' for all things blockchain at Twitter."
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Bluesky Thinking
Rinearson also said she will be "working closely" with Bluesky, the Dorsey-created, Twitter-funded, open-source project building a decentralized protocol able to host any social media platform. The goal, she said, is "to help shape the future of decentralized social media (and to make sure that Twitter stays on the cutting edge of this new landscape, too!)"
Bluesky is part of a growing movement in the cryptocurrency industry, and tech developers generally, to embrace Web 3.0, a decentralized internet built on blockchain technology that would bypass tech giants' control to build a freer and more private web ecosystem.
Of course, Twitter is one of those giants, and is itself a target of Web 3.0 believers. Earlier in November, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Solana co-founder Raj Gokal, and Solana Ventures announced a $100 million fund to invest in Web 3.0 social media technology.
