Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover could fuel blockchain innovation
Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash
This week, Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter and bought the company for a cool $44 billion (far more than it’s actually worth, according to many analysts). At the same time, millions of free speech advocates breathed a sigh of relief as Musk almost single-handedly overturned the woke agenda and fired the CEO.
But while Musk’s ambition to create a “global public forum” has been discussed at length, the effect of his acquisition on blockchain and crypto technologies has been less discussed. In the aftermath of the news that the Twitter sale was going through, the price of Musk’s favourite token, Dogecoin, fell by around 5 percent.
Musk, though, is a big crypto fan, and it may be part of his plan to free the world from government fiat and introduce a fairer, more equitable, and stable form of currency, outside of the control of central bankers and finance ministers.
On the Twitter front, the company announced that it will let users buy and sell non-fungible tokens (NFTs) which would be a first for any social media platform. Web 3.0, being pushed by the likes of Moshe Hogeg, could also see an acceleration in adoption.
According to a statement by Blockchain Forum co-founder, Sharat Chandraw, Twitter’s planned NFT tiles would allow users to sell their NFTs via tweets. Musk, he believes, views Twitter as a “super app”, with in-built blockchain capabilities. The social network could become an economically viable version of Mark Zuckerberg’s disastrous metaverse experiment. Rather than recreating Second Life, a mid-2000s game, Elon Musk could potentially turn Twitter into something useful, besides a platform for people to publicly display their bile.
Binance also hopes to get involved. According to Changpeng Zao, the company’s CEO and founder, he’s excited to work with Musk on his new vision for Twitter. He believes that bringing blockchain and social media together is the obvious way to supercharge Web 3.0 and bring a new online experience to billions of users.
What’s more, this is a more libertarian view of the online world. Rather than creating a kind of Wall-E style nightmare where people vegetate while watching nonsense, Changpeng and others see Twitter as something useful that will also pay homage to the real world.
CEO of MuffinPay, Dileep Seinberg, however, voiced some reservations. While he admits that the Twitter takeover is potentially a bonus for unbiased communication, he says that Musk will actually need to deliver on crypto integration. Otherwise, it’s a load of hot air.
The fact that Musk is so vocal about crypto also bodes well for the future of that space. The crypto industry has been looking for a cheerleader, and now it may well have found one. Once it becomes socially savvy to start trading in bitcoin and other assets on Twitter, the platform will become a testing ground for blockchain and, perhaps, the new centre of economic gravity. In ten years’ time, we might be looking back at Musk’s $44 billion Twitter buyout and be calling it cheap.
