DeSo Archives

The head of Nasdaq listed crypto exchange Coinbase, Brian Armstrong believes that decentralized social media (DeSo) is gearing up following Elon Musk purchase of Twitter making it a privately owned business once again. Appearing on the May 2 ‘Conversations with Crypto Pioneers’ at the Milken Institute Global Conference, joined by ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood, the Coinbase CEO shared some of his ideas of what a decentralized Twitter could become if Musk were to change the media platform into a Web3-based app. Armstrong said: “I think generally, this is a good effort towards free speech. I think freedom in all forms is worth defending and crypto, a lot of it, is about economic freedom. Freedom of speech is another version. I do think there’s an opportunity for Twitter to essentially embrace using a decentralized protocol and, just in the way that you’ve probably heard of DeFi, which is decentralized finance. There’s another one called DeSo, decentralized social media, which is another emerging area coming up." He added: "So a lot of teams are actually out there looking at, ‘Can we make a decentralized protocol for social media where it doesn’t mean some company owns my identity and all the content and all the likes and the follower graphs.’ Maybe I can own my own identity, a decentralized identity, and when I post something, it can be stored in IPFS or Filecoin in a decentralized ledger.’" Making the case for ultimate transparency, the CEO stressed: "Anybody could a make a client to consume all this information out there and display it to the user in various ways. By the way, they could each have their own kind of content moderation policy. But the data, the identity, the follower graphs have all become a public good, essentially, and have democratized access to that. And I think that’s one of the directions Twitter could go.”

DeSo

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong on Decentralized Social Media and Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover