Indeed, as lately as November 2019 Agrawal was nonetheless self-styling himself as “crypto-naive” throughout a fireplace chat held on Twitter’s campus with cryptocurrency entrepreneur Joseph Lubin. Just over per week later, Agrawal joined Dorsey on a trip to Nigeria, the place Agrawal met with the native Bitcoin neighborhood. Chris Maurice, CEO of the change YellowCard, who attended the meetups, remembers Agrawal—like Dorsey—being “extremely inquisitive” in regards to the topic. “They had a heavy preference for listening and learning, as opposed to being the center of attention,” Maurice remembers.

A number of months later, Agrawal was instrumental in spearheading bluesky, a Twitter-funded initiative to develop a protocol—potentially underpinned by a blockchain—to construct decentralized social networks, with a view to changing proprietary platforms reminiscent of Twitter and Facebook. The venture was initially run out of a non-public server on Matrix, a secure communication platform, earlier than shifting to a public Discord channel. Evan Henshaw-Plath, a former lead developer at Odeo, the podcast publishing platform from which ultimately Twitter was spun out, and who was additionally on the bluesky server, says Agrawal was not allowed to actively write on the server however was nonetheless there, “lurking, more observing, more listening than strongly pushing through his agenda.”

In Henshaw-Plath’s opinion, the selection of appointing Agrawal as CEO alerts that Twitter goes to work critically on decentralization and crypto. “I suspect Twitter will continue to experiment with various blockchain stuff, even if I have no idea what that would look like,” he says. He describes Twitter’s inside politics as a relentless duel between technologists like Dorsey pushing for a extra open, decentralized construction and businesspeople targeted on monetization. “Parag is definitely among the people who think that Twitter is a fundamental infrastructure, and who are driven by enabling interesting technology.”

But some folks in crypto don’t see Agrawal’s involvement in bluesky as a badge of advantage. Carter says the venture has a popularity for being slow-moving. “It is kind of stagnant,” he says. More usually, he’s skeptical in regards to the probabilities that an organization like Twitter—particularly after Dorsey’s departure—may genuinely deliver in regards to the decentralization of social networks. “I would expect to see some sort of crypto-based social media platforms developed at some point, but I think it would happen externally, not from within an established Silicon Valley company,” Carter says.

Mati Greenspan, founder and CEO of cryptocurrency funding consultancy Quantum Economics, is equally dismissive. “We can assume either that bluesky is building its protocol very, very quietly, and it’s a massive project—or we can assume that it’s kind of on the backburner and not a priority,” he says.

Henshaw-Plath counters that the creation of a blockchain protocol must be gradual, for its personal good. “It is a process; it involves a lot of people. Bluesky could be faster; there could be more stuff to be done with it. But it’s also a mistake to rush it too quickly,” he says. He believes that Agrawal’s personal temperament, which he describes as that of a “thoughtful consensus-builder,” means he’ll be capable to make Twitter a robust power in creating such applied sciences.





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