Former Zcash Developer to Lead Twitter’s Decentralized Social Media Project Bluesky

On December 11, 2019, the CEO of Twitter announced the company was funding a project aimed at creating a decentralized social media standard. Jack Dorsey said that the ultimate goal of the project dubbed “Bluesky” is for Twitter to be a client of the standard. A year and eight months later, Bluesky announced that a former software engineer from the Zcash project, Jay Graber, will be leading the Bluesky initiative.

Crypto Dev Jay Graber Will Lead the Bluesky Project

The Twitter initiative to decentralize social media called Bluesky will be led by someone involved with cryptocurrency development. On August 16, 2021, the former Zcash software developer Jay Graber announced that she will be leading the project going forward.

“I’m excited to announce that I’ll be leading Bluesky,” Graber tweeted on Monday. “An initiative started by Twitter to decentralize social media.”

The CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, also welcomed Graber to the project on Monday. “Jay will be leading Bluesky,” Dorsey tweeted. “Another step towards decentralizing Twitter and social media. Now we can move much faster, and through code.”

Dorsey revealed the project in December 2019 when the Twitter CEO said: “Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media.”

Dorsey added:

The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. Twitter was so open early on that many saw its potential to be a decentralized internet standard, like SMTP (email protocol). For a variety of reasons, all reasonable at the time, we took a different path and increasingly centralized Twitter.

Dorsey further explained that Bluesky is meant to change the centralized social media model and the Twitter CEO also brought up bitcoin. “Square is doing exactly this for bitcoin with Square Crypto,” he said at the time.

Bluesky Wants to Spark the ‘Decentralized Public Conversation’

The Bluesky website is called blueskyweb.org, and the page is very bare and has a brief description of the project’s goals. “We’re focusing on re-building the social web by connecting disconnected silos and returning control of the social experience to users,” Bluesky says. The website continues:

Our mission is to develop and drive the adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation.

Introducing InterRep, a reputation service. Goal: Make social account reputations portable to web3. Implementation: A service that mints a NFT reputation badge attesting an account is linked to an address. https://t.co/0xdqirljOJ

— Jay Graber (@arcalinea) July 2, 2021

Graber joined the Zcash team (electriccoin.co) in July 2016 and before that, she was an engineer at Skuchain. “I look forward to partnering closely with Twitter and other companies as we embark on this journey,” Graber said on Monday. “It won’t happen overnight, but we’ll share our progress along the way. If you’re interested in joining Bluesky, we have open roles on our website blueskyweb.org,” she added.

Just recently, Graber also introduced Interrep, a reputation service that can link with Twitter and web3. “Interrep started from the high level goal of making reputations on centralized social platforms more accessible to web3 apps, while preserving privacy more than public attestations, and executed on a simple solution: use a centralized server to act as a bridge,” Graber said.

What do you think about the Twitter-backed Bluesky project and Jay Graber leading the decentralized social media team? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.