Twitter Inc. is launching a dedicated crypto team.
The social-media company said Wednesday that it is assembling a team called “Twitter Crypto” to help creators on the app accept cryptocurrencies like bitcoin for making money or payments, and other ways to use blockchain technology. be able to help.
The team is led by Tess Reinerson, a new software engineer who will report to Twitter’s chief technology officer. The team is looking to fill new roles, but did not specify how many. Twitter said the new team will “set the strategy for the future of (and) crypto on Twitter.”
Twitter already lets people tip users with bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency. And it recently announced a way for users to verify that they have a non-fungible token, or NFT, which they post as a profile picture. But the company wants to explore decentralized apps that run independently, not via a company-owned server, giving users privacy and more control over what they can post.
A Twitter spokesperson declined to give specific examples of what the company was building, but said it “sees an opportunity to help creators participate directly on Twitter in the promise of an evolving, decentralized Internet.”
According to CoinDesk, the bitcoin price recently traded around $66,000, close to its all-time high.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, a longtime Bitcoin fan, sold his first tweet in the form of an NFT in March for about $2.9 million.
Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook said earlier this week that the company is looking at digital currencies. While the company has no immediate plans to accept cryptocurrency on Apple Pay or as a means of tendering for its products, “there are other things we’re certainly looking at,” Mr. Cook said at a conference on Tuesday. , without giving further details.
Other companies and executives have entered the crypto space. Tesla Inc. disclosed a $1.5 billion investment in bitcoin in February and began accepting the cryptocurrency as payment for its vehicles shortly thereafter. The company suspended that initiative in May, however, after Tesla CEO Elon Musk expressed concerns about the source of electricity used to power bitcoin mining.
Mr Musk said in July that he and his rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp, or SpaceX, hold bitcoin.
PayPal Holdings Inc. has said it wants to expand its business to enable customers to pay merchants with cryptocurrency assets. And payments company Square Inc., which, like Twitter, is also led by Mr. Dorsey, said last year that it had secured nearly $50 million worth of bitcoin for its corporate coffers.
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