Twitter Acquisition Could Bring Us a Step Closer to Web3 Adoption

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is being hailed by much of the crypto community, and it could become a model for a Web3-powered, decentralized social media and decentralized Internet, Coindesk writes.

The divide between users and platforms could become a thing of the past, changing the dynamics we know today. And transforming the site into a decentralized platform could be the first step towards a “self-sovereign” web, as well as the wide-spread adoption of Web3 protocols and tools.

A look at Twitter’s (TWTR) product lines like profiles, posts, messaging system and advertising could provide insight into what the self-sovereign web would look like and how to go about onboarding people.

As we can tell from your texts with former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, it seems you believe Twitter today is lingering at the limits of the utility it can provide. To become more useful to users and develop further as a “protocol” rather than as a company, we can learn a lot from email.

Email is a protocol. You might be using Microsoft Office, Dorsey might be using Proton, and I’m on Gmail. We can all easily message one another and be on the same thread, but see and write our emails via different application interfaces (e.g. Outlook, Gmail).

This model can be expanded to social media using systems like Filecoin, Arweave, Ceramic and Polybase. Users' connections and posts wouldn’t be confined to a single “walled garden” like Twitter or Facebook, but live on the open web. This data can still be private and permissioned (and therefore monetized) via threshold cryptography-powered access control (like what Lit is building).

On decentralized, user sovereign and privacy-focused social-media protocols, users will have the ability to consent to which applications and connections can see their content across interface platforms just like email.

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One of the biggest hurdles in Web3 is wallet user experience. For some people, self-custody of keys is a privilege, but for many more, it’s a burden. As a result, in the past year, there’s been an explosion of interest in multiparty computation (MPC).

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The decentralized networks to support global scale are still maturing, but there’s never been a better time to start laying the foundation.