you may have heard from crypto Twitter, the corner of the social network where accounts have Bored Apes as profile pictures, posts are teeming with the rumors of tokens, blockchains and buying the Bitcoin dip, and Elon Musk is revered.
On the other hand, you may have heard of Twitter Crypto, the business unit dedicated to developing the social network strategy for cryptocurrency, blockchains and that grab bag of decentralized technologies that come under the moniker of Web3. unveiling came in November 2021 via a tweet from the newly hired project lead, Tess Rinearson, a Berlin-based American computer scientist whose career includes stints at blockchain companies such as Tendermint and Interchain.
Rinearson joined Twitter at a pivotal time. Jack Dorsey, the vociferously pro-Bitcoin CEO, would leave a few weeks later to be replaced by CTO Parag Agrawal. Agrawal had been instrumental in Bluesky, a Twitter-backed project to create a protocol — possibly with blockchain components — to build decentralized social networks.
As crypto became mainstream globally and crypto Twitter emerged, the company sought to dominate the space. Led by product manager Esther Crawford, in September 2021 Twitter introduced a “tips” feature that helps creators on Twitter receive Bitcoin contributions via Lightning – a network for fast Bitcoin payments. In January, Twitter allowed subscribers to Twitter’s premium service, Twitter Blue, to show off their NFTs as hexagonal profile pictures, through a partnership with NFT marketplace OpenSea.
Twitter Crypto is just getting started. Although Rinearson works with people throughout the company, her team is still less than 10 people, although there are more people in the pipeline judging by recent vacancies† So it’s worth asking what’s next. I video chatted with Rinearson and Crawford to talk about where Twitter Crypto is headed.
The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
WIRED: Let’s start with the basics. Why does Twitter have a crypto unit?
Tess Rinearson: We really see crypto – and what we now call Web3 – as something that could be this incredibly powerful tool that would unlock a lot for our users. The whole crypto world is like an internet of money, an internet of value that our users can potentially tap into to create new ways to own their content, monetize their content, own their own identities and even interact with each other. to go.
One of my goals is to build Twitter’s crypto unit to accommodate communities beyond just that core crypto community. I love the crypto Twitter space of course – I am a very proud member of the crypto community. And at the same time, I recognize that people who are really deep in the crypto world may not relate to concepts, such as the immutability of blockchain, the same way someone less deeply involved in those things might feel.
So a lot of what we try to think about is, what can we learn from this group of people who are super engaged and really, really creative? And then how can we translate some of those things into a format or a mechanism or a product that’s a little bit more accessible to people who don’t have that background?
