Twitter wants to move its platform onto the blockchain. The social media giant is putting together a team to develop an open, decentralized standard for social media, with Twitter as one of its first clients, announced CEO Jack Dorsey. He declared the news and placed his thought in a tweet thread this morning, although he admitted that the process could take years.

The project is termed ‘Bluesky,’ and nobody’s working on it yet. Currently, Twitter’s CTO, ‘Parag Agrawal,’ is in the process of searching for someone to lead the initiative. The Bluesky team plans to either work on an existing decentralized social media standard, like Steem (a forerunner to EOS) or build one from scratch. 

“That’s the only direction we at Twitter, Inc. will provide,” added Dorsey. 

Twitter is already an associate in the ‘Data Transfer Project,’ a nascent attempt to allow data to be quickly moved between web platforms, and Bluesky’s work may link with that effort.

Bluesky team will find or consolidate a blockchain component into the project, the same technology that powers cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Bitcoin.

Ultimately, new technologies have occurred to make a decentralized approach more viable. Blockchain technology points to a series of decentralized solutions for open and durable governance, hosting, and monetization. Serious work to be done, but the fundamentals are there.

There are feelers as to whether this protocol will profit Twitter as a business. Building a new decentralized social media standard may shift power away from Twitter’s platform and with it, the ability to effectively monetize.

Dorsey claims, nevertheless, that this preferably would allow the social media giant to focus on innovation and produce healthier online discourse.

“It will allow us to access and contribute to a much larger corpus of public conversation, focus our efforts on building open recommendation algorithms which promote healthy conversation, and will force us to be far more innovative than in the past.”

The move follows several other decentralization-focused initiatives pushed by Dorsey. Square added support for buying and selling Bitcoin through its mobile application, ‘Cash App,’ at the end of 2017. By Q3 2018, Square was promoting the sale of roughly $50 million in Bitcoin per month, about 5,600 BTC, making it a meaningful fiat on and off-ramp for the United States.

“We observed that this was a feature our customers wanted, and we support Bitcoin because we see it as a step in the long-term path toward greater financial access for all,” as stated in Square’s Q3 2017 letter to its shareholders. 

In March, Dorsey began ‘Square Crypto,’ a project alike Bluesky. Square Crypto is a different five-person team that works on developing the Bitcoin ecosystem full-time interior of Twitter.

Jack Dorsey is speculating that decentralization is the way of the future. If Bluesky yields fruit at all, it could take years to see the results. 

However, it’s an unexpected direction for a social network to make in 2019, and it at least professes to expose new questions about how an internet that’s not full of walled gardens could operate.