Produced | Tiger Sniff Financial Group
The author | Zhou Zhou
The head art | Visual China
The big guys in the currency circle are becoming more and more "rampant", before there is "the richest Man in China" Zhao Changpeng bought Forbes, and then the world's richest man Musk bought Twitter.
The former is the leading commercial media outlet in the United States, while the latter is one of the world's largest social media giants. Although the attributes of the two companies are not the same, they belong to the media in a broad sense, and if they control them, they have the power of "mass preaching".
In February, Binance invested $200 million in Forbes, and while Mr. Zhao said it wouldn't affect the independence of forbes' reporting, it's clear that Forbes is increasingly adding the names of the Web3 richest people to its various lists.
In March of that year, Zhao Changpeng appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine with a fortune of $74 billion.
Halfway through April, Forbes was back in his Web3 business. After launching the virtual millionaire NFT, Forbes also covered its front page with chris Dixon, a partner at a16z, one of the most prominent crypto investment institutions in the United States.
Musk and Zhao Changpeng have been interacting on Twitter before. This may have given Musk, the "godfather of Dogecoin", the idea of buying Twitter and turning it into a privatized company to facilitate its influence.
Zhao Changpeng is not the only crypto circle friend who has influenced Musk. Two of his most well-known friends, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and Robinhood founder Vladimir Tenev, interact more closely with him online and offline.
Like Musk, both are tech elites, and both are in Web3.
Jack Dorsey is not only the head of Twitter, one of the world's largest social media platforms, but also the head of Square. Square, known as the American version of Alipay, is the leader of American payment companies, and directly changed its name to Block last year, fully Web3.
Jack Dorsey is a committed decentralized entrepreneur. Last year he left Twitter, which he founded, and this year he has said many times: Twitter has led to the centralization of the Internet against its original intentions, and I am responsible. This may have something to do with Twitter's conservative board, which began in 2019 as Jack Dorsey launched the BlueSky Project, which aims to create an open source, decentralized social platform standard that decentralizes the now highly centralized social platform party. However, Jack Dorsey is not satisfied with twitter's current state of still being over-centralized.
In fact, during his years as CEO, Jack Dorsey has made a lot of contributions to Web3. For example, he launched Twitter Space, a large number of Web3 practitioners use this space to communicate online; for example, he was the first to launch an NFT product released by the Internet giant, so that Twitter's user avatar can be displayed as NFT and authenticated; for example, almost all crypto circles have a Twitter account, and every encryption project will register an account on Twitter and post a link in it.
Twitter is undoubtedly the most pioneering and influential Internet giant connecting Web2 and Web3.
Google, Amazon, and Meta have been telling users that they will build an NFT platform and study cryptocurrencies, but in fact, they have not seen any products and effects.
This may be part of the reason musk bought Twitter, which is more advanced on Web3 than other Internet companies, and Twitter's actual leadership still inherits jack Dorsey's "decentralized" spirit. Twitter's new CEO, blueSky's team leader, has pledged to continue exploring decentralization.
Jack Dorsey actually left Musk with a Team with the spirit of Web3, and what Musk has to do is to use a lot of money to get people on Twitter's board who don't want to innovate to get rid of them.
After Musk expressed his determination to buy Twitter, another of his friends, Robinhood founder Vladimir Tenev duly expressed his views on DOGE today (April 15). He suggested that DOGE increase the block size limit to improve transaction speed.
Doge's current throughput is about 40 transactions per second, while Visa processes about 65,000 transactions per second, while Alipay can process 140,000 transactions per second. In contrast, the processing efficiency of DOGE is too low.
Musk agrees with Vladimir Tenev. His friend founded Robinhood, China's equivalent of CITIC Securities or Orient Wealth, which was previously known as the "american retail home." For now, the company will put more effort into providing people with digital currency transactions such as Bitcoin. "Bitcoin is Robinhood's most frequently bought asset so far in 2022." The company's product chief Aparna Chennapragada said last week (April 2022).
With so many friends who believe in Web3, Musk naturally hears it. In fact, whether it is cryptocurrency or NFT, Musk is playing a thief. He himself had announced that he was going to sell a music NFT, and his ex-girlfriend Grimes had sold several pieces of NFT artwork for nearly $6 million.
Of course, both cryptocurrencies and NFTs have financial attributes, are extremely risky, and have no value for the vast majority of Chinese.
The point of value is that Musk can turn Twitter into a more decentralized product that cannot be arbitrarily deleted and that every piece of data belongs to the user.
On April 1, some netizens broke the news that the staff of Tencent Documents "peeked" at the startup's documents without authorization and were found. However, more than half a month after the incident, the official has not yet replied. This is actually a drawback that has always existed in Internet centralized products, and many of our privacy behaviors on the Internet have been monitored by Internet giants. Our private data, which is sold to other vendors by centralized products, is also a difficult thing to trace. And the data produced by each person is valuable, and private individuals can sell it to banks and hospitals for benefit, but centralized companies often take it for themselves and enjoy it exclusively, rather than sharing the proceeds of the data with users.
"If we can increase trust in Twitter as a public platform, the risk of civilization will be reduced." Musk said.
This may be the meaning of Twitter Web3, as a centralized platform, it is easy to be used by the authoritarian to circle their own money tool, and as a decentralized platform or partially decentralized platform, it will institutionally eliminate or partially eliminate the behavior of the public platform because of the private interests of some people, so that every user has the right to freely control and use their own data.
Twitter is currently the most Web3 Internet giant, will Musk's addition make it more Web3-oriented?