Source: The Verge
The new Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal is more enthusiastic about Web3 than his predecessor Jack Dorsey.
Speaking on Twitter’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday, CEO Parag Agrawal said he was “excited about all the opportunities potentially that might be created by Web3, a possible Internet successor to Web 2.0 based on blockchain technology. That is in contrast to Dorsey, the founder & former CEO of Twitter, who has feuded on social media over the matter.
Agrawal, who was previously served as the company’s chief technology officer, took over from Dorsey late last year, making Thursday’s earnings call his first as the company’s chief executive. When asked about Web3, he said he sees an “incredible amount of developer energy” throughout the Crypto ecosystem, which is interested in solving problems according to a transcription from seeking alpha.
This, he said, “creates opportunities for a service like ours, which operates at scale with many customers and this happens to be the place where this whole ecosystem goes to find out what’s going on in the whole ecosystem.
Proponents of Web3 say that it will be decentralized & owned by individuals rather than tech giants. Agrawal said Twitter has a dedicated team evaluating opportunities on how to “leverage this change for the benefit of creators on our service, for the benefit of all consumers on Twitter.” The company previously said it is working on building its own decentralized media platform called Bluesky.
But Jack Dorsey, now the CEO of Block, has snubbed the idea of individuals owning the next version of internet.
“You don’t own ‘web3’,” he wrote in a tweet on December 20. “The VCs & their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. Ultimately, it’s a centralized entity with a different label. Knowing what you’re getting into……”
In another tweet, he vilified a16z, the venture capital firm investing heavily in the future of the internet, as the owner of Web3. In response, a16z founder Marc Andreessen blocked Dorsey, who continued on spree of his own.
Outside of a16z & Twitter, others are also working to develop their Web3 potential. GameStop, for example, sought Web3 game leaders, & Reddit worked on Web3 features for its social platform.
