Crypto Developer to Lead Twitter’s “Decentralized Standard for Social Media” Bluesky

Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey’s “decentralized standard for social media” Bluesky has found its lead in Jay Graber, a cryptocurrency developer and a founder of a social events startup.

As we reported last week, Dorsey acknowledged that Bluesky has “taken a long time,” which was first announced in 2019, as the team decided to research before hiring a lead which he said would be announced this week.

And on Monday, Twitter said the open-source project will be led by Graber and is currently focused on hiring and setting up the group as an independent entity that will be funded by Twitter.

“Over the past year, I’ve been working closely with a group of thinkers and builders from the decentralized social ecosystem. We published an ecosystem review in January, and my next step will be hiring for the bluesky team,” said Graber on Twitter.

Graber built her own decentralized social network called Happening and previously worked on the development team behind the privacy-focused cryptocurrency Zcash (ZEC).

Jay will be leading @bluesky!

Another step towards decentralizing Twitter and social media.

Now we can move much faster, and through code. https://t.co/9RLR4Je8GE

— jack⚡️ (@jack) August 16, 2021

“The team and community that Jay will bring together can shape the future of social media through decentralization using open standards,” said Parag Agrawal, CTO at Twitter.

Dorsey had previously said that with Bluesky, the idea is to introduce new decentralized technology as a standard on which others will rebuild their platforms and become its clients. This, he had said, will allow collaboration on building content algorithms promoting “healthy conversation.”

Back in March, in written testimony to a US House committee, Dorsey said the project is “complex and unprecedented” and is expected to take years to build.