Glossary

Bluesky Crypto Protocol

Easy

The Bluesky crypto protocol is a decentralized social network protocol, organized by Twitter.

What Is Bluesky Crypto Protocol?

The Bluesky crypto protocol is a decentralized social network protocol, organized by Twitter, that allows several social networks to interact with other social networks, thanks to an open standard. These networks, which are all communicating with each other and have their own moderation and content curation systems, are called "applications."

Bluesky has been compared to IPFS, a P2P filesharing protocol, and Basic Attention Token (BAT), a token incentivizing ad-watching on the Brave browser

Who Founded Bluesky Crypto Protocol?

The then-CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, announced the Bluesky initiative in 2019 on Twitter. Parag Agrawal, CTO at that time and CEO of Twitter as of October 2022, invited the first batch of working group members at the beginning of 2020. Jay Graber of the Happening decentralized social network joined the Bluesky initiative as project lead in August 2021. She was tasked with composing a technical review of the decentralized social network sector.

What Is the Connection Between Bluesky and Twitter?

Besides being backed by several current and former Twitter executives, Bluesky's goals and scope are approved by Twitter. This refers to the applications that are part of the protocol and the goals of Bluesky. It aims to allow applications to customize their moderation system and make them responsible for compliance and takedown requests. 

Furthermore, applications are to prevent algorithms that reinforce viral loops based on controversy and moral outrage. However, there is still no common consensus on how to achieve this. 

What Is the Impact of Elon Musk's Takeover of Twitter on Bluesky?

Even before Elon Musk renewed his commitment to buy Twitter, Bluesky clarified that it was independent of Twitter and registered as a public benefit limited liability company since February 2022. This gives Bluesky the freedom to put its resources towards its mission without an obligation to return money to shareholders. The team owns the Bluesky initiative, meaning Twitter has no controlling stake in the company. Furthermore, it has $13 million in funding.

Bluesky also stated that it would "work towards our vision of a durable protocol for public conversation no matter what happens." Elon Musk has repeatedly vowed to fight spam bots on Twitter and toyed with the idea of introducing crypto payments on the platform. 

What Is the Bluesky R&D?

Bluesky released some code in May 2022, publishing a command line for testing, an experimental personal data server, and a high-level overview of the network architecture. It aims to allow individual users to transfer their data between applications, enabling user-owned data in contrast to the company-owned data standard to web2 social networks.