The looming legal battle will likely not happen. Elon Musk will buy Twitter after all, at the original asking price. The ambitious billionaire and cryptocurrency enthusiast reportedly has some plans to turn the social networking giant into his Web3 version.
Would Elon Musk like to base Twitter on the blockchain?
We know about Elon Musk’s outsized ambitions for Twitter thanks to leaked messages between the billionaire and Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of the social network. On April 9, the billionaire explained:
“I had an idea for a blockchain-based social network system that would do both payments and short messages/links, like Twitter.”
The idea would be to charge users for posts, for a paltry fraction of a cent. This would have very little impact on regular users, but it would prevent scammers from sending too many messages.
“You should pay maybe 0.1 DOGE per comment or repost.”
Elon Musk sees the blockchain as a tool to resist censorship. On April 14, he explained that he had a “plan B” for “a blockchain version of Twitter.”
Integrating Twitter into the enigmatic “super app” X?
But since then, the agreement with Twitter had fallen through, and a long legal battle was looming. Until Elon Musk decided to buy the social network again. Will we then see Twitter integrated on a blockchain?
Not necessarily, if we believe a brief message sent by Elon Musk on April 25. In the end, he thought that “a Twitter on the blockchain is not possible”, because of scaling issues. Will the role then be taken by “X,” his enigmatic app meant to serve a wide range of needs? The billionaire implied that the social network would be one of the building blocks of this new project.
This “super app” could therefore swallow up the social network. When asked about the need to integrate Twitter rather than creating a social network, Elon Musk replied that this could speed up the development of X “by 3 to 5 years”.
Elon Musk being particularly changeable in his communications, we can of course not consider this as a definitive project. But it does show the ambitions of the billionaire, who presumably wants to integrate a social network with a payment system, based on blockchain technologies.
