Frank McCourt, a billionaire actual property mogul and former proprietor of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is backing a brand new effort for a decentrali
Frank McCourt, a billionaire actual property mogul and former proprietor of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is backing a brand new effort for a decentralized social media venture based mostly on blockchain expertise.
McCourt is investing $100 million into an try to reinvent the foundations of social media by constructing a publicly accessible database of individuals’s social connections on a blockchain, Bloomberg reported Sunday.
“Undertaking Liberty” goals to permit customers to maneuver data of their interactions between social media providers as a substitute of being locked into a couple of dominant functions. The venture would use blockchain expertise to assemble a brand new web infrastructure referred to as the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP). The DSNP would preserve person data and connections in an analogous technique to how a blockchain shops knowledge concerning cryptocurrency transactions.
This decentralized method has the potential to undermine the ability of content material moderation by permitting customers who’re kicked out of 1 platform to easily transfer their audiences to extra permissive ones. The platform may additionally discourage dangerous conduct as a result of individuals could be tied to their posts eternally, as blockchain knowledge is immutable, the report notes.
With a view to construct the DSNP, McCourt employed Braxton Woodham, the co-founder of the meal supply service Solar Basket and former chief expertise officer on the film ticket web site Fandango. The billionaire businessman pledged to place $75 million into an institute at Georgetown College in Washington, and Sciences Po in Paris for expertise analysis, whereas the remaining $25 million will probably be channeled into pushing entrepreneurs to construct DSNP-based providers.
McCourt mentioned that the platform may handle the present distribution of energy in social media:
“We dwell beneath fixed surveillance, and what’s occurring with this huge accumulation of wealth and energy within the palms of some, that’s extremely destabilizing. It threatens capitalism as a result of capitalism must have some type of equity in it so as to survive.”
Associated: Jack Dorsey says he’ll combine Lightning Community into Twitter or BlueSky
For the reason that inception of blockchain expertise, numerous initiatives and firms have used distributed ledger expertise in social media. Earlier in June, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey disclosed plans to combine Bitcoin’s Lightning Community sidechain into Twitter or its decentralized social community BlueSky.
As beforehand reported, the EOSIO-based social media venture Voice went dwell final 12 months. Beforehand, a Yale professor and a Goldman Sachs veteran had been planning to design a blockchain-based Fb rival referred to as Revolution Populi.