Twitter is expanding further into the world of cryptocurrencies as the social media giant is setting up a team dedicated to looking into decentralized applications, cryptocurrencies and blockchain.
To this effect, Twitter announced Tess Rinearson to lead its new cryptocurrency team.
Prior to joining Twitter, Rinearson worked at Tendermint on the consensus engine Tendermint Core, worked at the software payments firm Interstellar and is a council member of the Interchain Foundation.
What they are saying
According to a Wednesday tweet, Rinearson said her team would be working with Twitter’s Bluesky project on a decentralized social media platform as well as “exploring how ideas from crypto communities can help us push the boundaries of what’s possible with identity, community, ownership and more.”
Tess tweeted, “I’m thrilled to share that I’ve joined Twitter, lead a new team focused on crypto, blockchains, and other decentralized technologies—including and going beyond cryptocurrencies.”
The initiative called ‘Twitter Crypto’ will be hiring additional members with engineering and product skills. Based in Berlin, Rinearson said she had no plans to leave Germany but would organize a “distributed and cross-cultural” team for the new project.
She added, “As I build out the team, we’ll be working to figure out what crypto can do for Twitter, as well as what Twitter can do for crypto. Twitter truly “gets” crypto (hello bitcoin tipping & NFTs!) but there’s so much more to explore here.”
What you should know
- The announcement comes less than two months after Twitter first launched crypto tipping for its users through a partnership with Lightning Network provider Strike Inc.
- Twitter has approximately 200 million daily active users and they can also have the option of adding a Bitcoin (BTC) address directly to their profiles.
- Square and Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey has also proposed developing a decentralized exchange for Bitcoin as many in the space call for platforms and projects to avoid some of the problems of centralization.
- Recently, the former head of Microsoft’s Decentralized Identity team, Daniel Buchner announced he would be leaving the tech company to join Square.
- Twitter currently trades $52.39, down 2.27% for the day, as of the time of this report.
