Newly minted Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal wants to harness Web3 to benefit consumers. That comes in contrast to the former Twitter boss who has dissed the future internet and its backers. Agrawal said he sees opportunity in Web3 and “incredible” energy to solve problems. Loading Something is loading.
Twitter’s new boss is more excited about Web3 than his predecessor Jack Dorsey.
In Twitter’s fourth-quarter earnings call Thursday, CEO Parag Agrawal said he’s “excited about all the opportunities” potentially created by Web3, a possible internet successor to Web 2.0 that runs on blockchain technology. That’s in contrast to Dorsey, the founder and former CEO of Twitter, who has gotten in social-media spats over the matter.
Agrawal, who was previously the company’s chief technology officer, took over Dorsey’s role late last year, making Thursday’s earnings call his first as the head of the company. When asked about Web3, he said he sees an “incredible amount of developer energy” across the crypto ecosystem which is interested in solving problems, according to a transcript from Seeking Alpha.
That, he said, “creates opportunities for a service like ours, which is operating at scale with a lot of customers and which happens to be the place where this entire ecosystem goes to find out what’s happening across the ecosystem.”
Proponents of Web3 say it will be decentralized and owned by individuals, instead of tech giants. Agrawal said Twitter has a dedicated team evaluating opportunities for how to “harness this change towards benefiting creators on our service, towards benefiting all consumers on Twitter.” The company has previously said it’s working on building its own decentralized media platform called Bluesky.
But Dorsey, now the CEO of Block (formerly Square), has snubbed the idea of individuals owning the next version of the internet.
“You don’t own ‘web3,'” he wrote in a December 20 tweet. “The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It’s ultimately a centralized entity with a different label. Know what you’re getting into…”
In another tweet, he dissed a16z, the venture capital firm heavily investing in the future internet, as owning Web3. In response, a16z founder Marc Andreessen blocked Dorsey, who went on an unfollowing spree of his own.
Outside of a16z and Twitter, others are also working on building their Web3 potential. GameStop, for example, has sought Web3 gaming leaders, and Reddit has worked on Web3 features for its social platform.
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