Twitter Funded Bluesky Claims It Is Independent From Elon Musk' New Venture

BlueSky was funded by Twitter, but the social media platform does not hold any controlling stake in the platform.

By Shomik Sen Bhattacharjee | Updated: 27 April 2022 18:41 IST

Twitter Funded Bluesky Claims It Is Independent From Elon Musk' New Venture

Photo Credit: Unsplash/ Alexander Shatov

BlueSky is a project funded by Twitter to build a decentralized standard for social media

Highlights

Bluesky claims Twitter has no holding stake in the company
The company has around $13 million in funds for independent R&D
Jack Dorsey first announced the creation of Bluekky in December 2019

Bluesky, a project funded by Twitter to build a decentralised standard for social media, has stated that the company is not controlled by the company following Elon Musk's purchase. The Twitter-funded social media project explained, via a tweet that it has been independently operating as a public benefit limited liability company since February. The project, which seeks to rebuild how social media companies operate, followed up its initial tweet with a long sequence of notes explaining how it operates independently.

"The 'public benefit' part of our structure gives us the freedom to put our resources towards our mission without an obligation to return money to shareholders," Bluesky tweeted. "The company is owned by the team itself, without any controlling stake held by Twitter."

Given the surge of interest in Twitter's future, we thought this would be a good time to clarify the relationship between Bluesky and Twitter.
— bluesky (@bluesky) April 25, 2022

According to Bluesky, where former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey remains a board member, it has $13 million (roughly Rs. 99.5 crore) in funding "to ensure we have the freedom and independence to get started on R&D."

The “public benefit” part of our structure gives us the freedom to put our resources towards our mission without an obligation to return money to shareholders. The company is owned by the team itself, without any controlling stake held by Twitter.
— bluesky (@bluesky) April 25, 2022

Bluesky's demonstrated independence status makes it somewhat immaterial to Musk's immediate plans to “revamp” Twitter. The Tesla CEO has already made it known that upon purchase of the social media giant, he would take it private. In addition, Musk also intends to promote “free speech” and minimize content moderation on Twitter.

Twitter's funding of Bluesky is not subject to any conditions except one: that Bluesky is to research and develop technologies that enable open and decentralized public conversation.
— bluesky (@bluesky) April 25, 2022

Started in 2019 by Jack Dorsey, Bluesky gained momentum in 2021 primarily because of two key developments. The first was an ecosystem review of decentralised metaverse social apps serving crypto and Web 3 in January and second, the August appointment of Zcash veteran developer Jay Graber as its lead.

Since its inception, Bluesky has borrowed inspiration from several crypto projects. These include IPFS, a protocol that allows for peer-to-peer file sharing, as well as the Basic Attention Token that incentivises Brave browser users to watch ads.

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