Original author: flowie, ChainCatcher

Original author: flowie, ChainCatcher

" the bird is free (this bird is free)"

This is Musk’s latest tweet, which also means that the half-year-long Twitter acquisition has basically come to an end.

• Previously, the most lively acquisition case of the year went through three reversals:

• The first time was in March, when Musk increased his holdings of 9.2% of Twitter shares and was invited to join Twitter’s board of directors, but soon Musk stated that he refused to join the board of directors and declared that Twitter would be privatized;

• The second time was in April, when Musk proposed to acquire Twitter for US$44 billion, but just after the acquisition agreement was signed, Musk regretted terminating the acquisition;

For the third time this month, Twitter shareholders took Musk to court in July. Musk was forced to face a breakup fee of US$1 billion. After several months of dragging, Musk announced that he would fulfill the acquisition contract as originally planned. until the acquisition is formally completed.

Despite many reversals and scolding battles, Musk's acquisition of Twitter is well-received.

Jack Dorsey, the founder and former CEO of Twitter, has supported Musk six times in a row, saying that "Twitter should not be owned or operated by anyone, and should become a protocol-level public product, not a company. To solve this problem, Musk is the only solution I trust."On September 28, with Musk's announcement about the acquisition of Twitter40 pages of SMS proof materials

After being announced, nearly a thousand private conversations between Musk and many industry leaders also surfaced. Oracle founder Larry Elliso, 8VC managing partner Joe lonsdale, Musk’s younger brother Kimbal Musk and other industry leaders, as the earliest think tank for Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, expressed the expectation that “we really need another Twitter” , and actively make suggestions for the future model of Twitter. Giants such as Binance, a16z, and Sequoia Capital have also publicly promised to provide Musk with hundreds of millions of dollars in acquisition funding support.Musk, who carries many expectations, will continue the original intention of founder Jack Dorsey and make Twitter look brand new through a decentralized protocol?

At the same time, a group of Twitter revolutionaries such as Bluesky and Lens Protocol have been running for a while, but the progress is generally slow. Can Twitter, after Musk's acquisition, be used as a catfish to activate the Web3 social track?

first level title

Twitter's Idealized Future: Free Speech, Decentralized Innovation, No AdsFrom the beginning to the end, maintaining the freedom of speech in the field of public opinion has been Musk's core appeal.

The 40-page text message records disclosed by the Delaware Chancery Court show that on the eve of the acquisition proposal, Musk chatted with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and other friends and said, "Freedom of speech is important, even when the people you hate are talking nonsense. It’s the same when it’s gossip”, “I might buy Twitter and let Twitter speak freely.”, he wants a world where healthy debate exists for a wide range of beliefs, where unrestrained freedom of speech has fueled "extremely divisive social hatred" with a flood of money-making media messages, and said "twitter clearly cannot Call it a hell where everyone can play freely."

also,also,The support for freedom of speech is also clearly reflected in the first conversation between Musk and Twitter's former CEO Parag Agrawal.

According to the text messages in the evidence materials, Agrawal questioned Musk, "Why do you want to tweet 'Twitter is dying', you are about to join the company's board of directors, you should not publicly criticize the company. It didn’t help.” This quickly angered Musk, who said he would no longer be on Twitter’s board of directors and wanted to privatize Twitter.

And in Musk's vision, how will he transform Twitter to defend his insistence on free speech?The first idea is to try to do some decentralized innovation.For Jack Dorsey's "Rather than having Twitter remain subject to the traditional corporate model, it should be funded by a foundation that has no control over the underlying public protocol.

"Musk said in the chat reply that "the idea is very interesting" and believes that "some decentralized innovations are indeed needed to bring Twitter in a better direction." In addition, when the acquisition agreement was just signed in April, Musk promised in a tweet that he would open source the algorithm to increase public trust.In terms of payment methods, Musk proposed at the Twitter plenary meeting to integrate digital payments into Twitter to make remittances more convenient.

Previously, Twitter has already introduced encryption-related functions, such as launching a "tip" service that supports Bitcoin/Ethereum, and supporting NFT avatars. Previously, the Tweet Tiles function launched by Twitter in cooperation with the NFT market has also been officially confirmed, and users will be able to directly display, buy and sell NFT through Twitter.

also,also,Musk's biggest headaches with spam bots and post-tweet editing are also priorities for the revamp.

Musk's younger brother Kimbal Musk mentioned that Web3 has a fair voting mechanism, which can be applied to products to drive out robots and scammers.In terms of business model, the advertising business is bound to undergo major adjustments.

In the open letter released by Twitter yesterday, Musk focused on Twitter's advertising business, saying that if the advertising business is done well enough, it will benefit users and the ecology, and he will also be committed to making Twitter an excellent "advertising platform." ".But judging from the SMS chats and public statements before the acquisition,Musk and Jack Dorsey once agreed that the advertising model should not be used, even though 90% of Twitter's revenue came from advertising last year.But the reasons for their opposition are different. Jack Dorsey believes that the advertising model will lead to an increased ability of governments and advertisers to control Twitter. On the other hand, Musk believes that relying on advertising to survive, the power of enterprises to control policies will be greatly enhanced, and it is not decentralized enough.

According to a plan that Musk previously submitted to investors, Musk expects to reduce the proportion of Twitter’s advertising revenue from about 90% in 2020 to 45% in 2028.In addition to the advertising model business, what revenue-increasing plans will you expand?

In the text message record, Musk mentioned the idea of ​​charging content publishing fees. “I once had a plan B, which was a blockchain-based version of Twitter. ‘Tweets’ were embedded in transactions as comments, and users had to post or retweet comments with 0.1Doge.”

In the text message chat, Musk also mentioned more ideas about the "blockchain version of Twitter", which may be applied to Twitter in the future.

Specifically, Musk believes that the platform can also pay, send messages, and send links just like Twitter. The difference is that each message can be stored on the blockchain, and users need to pay a small fee, which will reduce most spam and fake accounts. At the same time, there is no "throat-choking" censorship here, so that freedom of speech is guaranteed.

Secondly, a huge real-time database needs to be built to save a copy of all blockchain messages, including all information sent and accepted by users and information on followers and followers.

Then, a Twitter-like app is needed on the mobile phone side, allowing users to access the database from the cloud.Although Musk has put forward various ideas on blockchain transformation Twitter, there are also blockchain/Crypto/web3 evangelists such as Jack Dorsey and Kimbal Musk in his think tank

However, Musk is not optimistic about the specific degree of realization.When a friend introduced FTX founder SBF to discuss the acquisition of Twitter, Musk refused to join the blockchain-related debate and expressed a pessimistic attitude.

"When the peer-to-peer network cannot reach the bandwidth and speed of the Internet, blockchain Twitter is almost impossible. If each point is 'packaged' very large, it defeats the purpose of a decentralized network."

Who will manage Twitter after it is acquired? Or usher in major personnel changes?

As of press time, Musk has not made it clear, but according to Bloomberg, Musk (Elon Musk) plans to serve as CEO of Twitter. CNBC financial reporter David Faber also tweeted that Twitter is now in charge of Musk, and former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and former CFO Ned Segal have left the company headquarters. The media The Spectator Index broke the news that Musk has fired Twitter’s head of legal policy, who decided to ban Trump’s account.Parag Agrawal's departure from Twitter is no surprise. Judging from the text chat, Parag Agrawal and Musk are almost at odds.

Musk expressed dissatisfaction with Parag Agrawal's efficiency, "He moves too slowly, trying to please people who will not be happy anyway." After a meeting, Jack Dorsey also said to Musk, "At least you can't work together ".

And Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who promoted the acquisition and has a good personal relationship with Musk, should not participate in the project. Asked in a text chat whether he would bring Jack Dorsey back to Twitter, Musk replied that Jack Dorsey was focused on Bitcoin and web3 and would not return.According to the disclosure message,Musk prefers to introduce more technology to talents, rather than management to talents.

Regarding the Uber professional manager recommended by the headhunter, Musk replied, "I don't want to meet any CXO, I need someone who can write good code, recruit Good Engineer (good engineer), not management talent."In addition to the core management team, have there been any other major personnel changes after Twitter was acquired?

Earlier this month, The Washington Post reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that Musk had told potential investors that he planned to lay off nearly 75% of Twitter's 7,500 employees. In a question and answer with Twitter employees in June, it also expressed the need to "rationalize the number of employees" and cut personnel expenses by $800 million.

But soon after, according to Bloomberg News citing people familiar with the matter, Musk denied the massive layoff plan within Twitter.

How are the projects that want to revolutionize Twitter doing?

As Musk inferred, it is not easy to implement a decentralized "Twitter" based on the blockchain. Steemit, Voice launched by Block.one, etc. are the earliest social media dedicated to decentralization, but most of them are not disbanded. , is forced to transform. Relying on a similar interface to Twitter, Mastodon, which has achieved great success, still has a huge gap with Twitter in terms of user volume and activity.Despite this, there are still many projects on the decentralized social track. Previously,ChainCatcher briefly introduces 9 representative early projects

, including Lens Protocol, Bluesky, DeSo, Mem Protocol, Cyberconnect, Atem Network, BBS Network, 5Degrees, NFTychat, etc.The most noteworthy of these,

Bluesky is a project initiated by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. The project was originally started by Twitter, but it is independent of Twitter. This project, which has a common soul with Twitter, may provide some inspiration for Twitter's road to decentralization.

In the current mechanism design of Bluesky, it is clearly stated that the development and adoption of decentralized protocols is the way to establish a strong technical foundation and will be independent of any blockchain.

Judging from the initial version code released by Bluesky, Bluesky's review mechanism is carried out at multiple levels through the system, including aggregation algorithms, reputation-based thresholds, and user selection. In addition, service providers are required to remove illegal content according to local laws.

In terms of specific architecture, Bluesky combines the portability of "self-certifying protocols" with the friendly user experience under the entrusted hosting mechanism, so that users do not have to run their own infrastructure, while developing Those who can build high-performance applications.

Bluesky has announced the first batch of community projects, including decentralized social networks Mastodon, manyver.se, Planetary, Iris, encrypted chat tool Element, peer-to-peer browser BeakerBrowser, video conferencing tool Meeting, video playback tool Watchit, music streaming platform Audius, And Web 3.0 privacy and data protection project Mask Network, etc. But there seems to be no substantive cooperation at present.

Although Bluesky's progress is relatively slow, on the eve of the deadline for Musk's acquisition of Twitter, Bluesky also updated the latest developments one after another.

On October 19, Bluesky plans to rename its ADX protocol to the Authenticated Transport (AT) protocol. The AT protocol will operate on federated networks, a type of network configuration with a central management framework that distributes shared resources among multiple connected networks or locations.

Bluesky exemplifies the network model, as many sites run the protocol and users can choose among providers. In turn, individuals or businesses can choose to self-host. The effect is that after the AT protocol enables the exchange of accounts between suppliers, it will not cause any data loss or affect the social graph, and will return a greater degree of control to users in terms of content and connectivity.

The project has an official website that is still under construction and will soon release a social-focused Bluesky application based on the AT protocol. It is reported that only 48 hours after the release of the preview application, 30,000 people have registered for its application. waiting list.But compared with Twitter's huge user base, Bluesky's progress is slow.

From the blog paper of its current CEO Jake Graber, it can be seen that the immaturity of Web3-based algorithm functions is a major obstacle, "The network used today is inseparable from the support of content discovery algorithms, but Web3 still needs to improve its user experience. It needs to further refine its algorithm function.”Furthermore, in Jake Graber's view,

Social graphs, user profiles, identity and reputation proofs, content aggregation, indexing and discovery, and curation and governance methods in Web3 are also immature.