A Decentralized Twitter? FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried Explains How It Could Happen

Sam Bankman-Fried — the young billionaire chief executive officer of major crypto exchange FTX — shared his thoughts about how a decentralized Twitter Inc. TWTR could work.

What Happened: Fried said in a Thursday Twitter thread that in a decentralized Twitter, all tweets would be saved on a blockchain, with encryption determining who has access to them.

This system would also unify direct messages and tweets, with direct messages being tweets that only a single recipient could read.

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The Details: Content monetization in this system would be possible through two different systems, Bankman-Fried said.

Tweets could cost users money, and Fried estimated that with 500 million tweets per day at a $0.01 price, it would replace half of Twitter's revenue, while at $0.001 per tweet it would replace its profit.

The other way to make revenue would be to monetize the user interface or by adding advertising, he said. 

Fried highlighted that storing messages on-chain would result in users having control over their data, and anyone could also build an alternative Twitter user interface.

Such alternative user interfaces would show the same messages and tweets thanks to a blockchain integration and could further expand the ecosystem and pay fees or subsidize the development.

Furthermore, different user interfaces could potentially have different policies and filter messages based on different factors — this would result in "no longer one person/company controlling speech."

EXCLUSIVE: FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried On Regulation, Tokenization, Building 'A Global Liquidity Venue'

Crypto And Twitter: Fried suggested that with its fees of about $0.0005 per transaction, Solana SOL/USD would only eat up a small fraction of Twitter's revenue. 

"This would force some [blockchain] to scale to hundreds of thousands of [transactions per second], if not millions, if likes/RTs were also on-chain. But honestly that's something that has to happen eventually anyway."

Furthermore, since this version of Twitter would be completely on-chain, integrating tips, payments and monetization for content creators as well as non-fungible tokens representing user-profiles and avatars "would be trivial."

He said "sure, why not" to Dogecoin DOGE/USD.

The Last Word: FTX's CEO said it would be good for Twitter since the company is "only net making about $300 million per year right now" and it would also democratize social media and make finances transparent while also removing a single point of failure.