Crypto commentator and Easy Money author Jacob Silverman has convinced a US district judge to order Elon Musk to reveal the shareholders of X (formerly Twitter). The journalist intervened as a non-party in an unrelated California legal dispute involving Musk’s last-minute maneuvers in taking the platform private. 

Silverman explained his reasoning succinctly: “People should know who owns an important site for public discourse and whether its free-speech fundamentalist majority shareholder is doing business with censorious dictatorships.”

According to the judge, Silverman prevailed in his request for public disclosure because he filed a timely request — “not enough delay to deny intervention under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 24(b)” — and did not prejudice nor re-litigate any issues that would have denied his intervention request.

Instead, he permissively placed a valid legal burden on respondents that was “not onerous.”

According to the judge, the list of Twitter shareholders “does not contain any scandalous information or trade secrets” and may be revealed for “public interest in understanding the judicial process.”

United States District Judge Susan Illston ruled that by September 4, X “​​shall file an unredacted version of the supplemental corporate disclosure statement on the public docket.” For the first time, the world will know the names of all major equity owners of the company when Musk acquired it.

Read more: X has been a crypto scam-filled failure for Elon Musk — now what?

Jacob Silverman wants the world to know who’s really behind X

Silverman has written critically about Musk’s chaotic weeks of acquisition negotiations with Jack Dorsey and his board of directors. In Silverman’s view, Musk bought Twitter to empower Republicans and techno-capitalists who felt victimized by changing social norms.

Indeed, Musk is a staunch Trump supporter and aligned with many right-wing views such as offense at gender pronouns. He also called the Democratic Party “the party of division and hate.” Despite Musk’s public claims of enhancing free speech on X, Silverman believes that he actually just wants to influence political outcomes.

Following that logic, Silverman is curious about foreign interests who might have owned equity in Twitter and persuaded or compensated Musk in his going-private bids. Silverman intervened in at least two lawsuits seeking disclosure of the names on Twitter’s cap table, and he has won his bid for at least one.

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Bitcoin Magazine, Wendy O, Mario Nawfal, Wayne Vaughan, and other influencers revealed the disturbing extent of crypto’s pro-Donald Trump bias by brazenly publishing fake news about US Presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

The news was a supposed scoop that Harris would, if elected President, nominate Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Gary Gensler as US Treasury Secretary.

However, she has never said that. Indeed, multiple members of Congress familiar with Harris’ shortlist of treasury secretary candidates have pointed out that her supposed selection of Gary Gensler was false.

But, undeterred by fact checks, the influencers in question refused to remove their debunked posts. Crypto fans retweeted the fake news thousands of times, clicked the Like button over 2,600 times on Bitcoin Magazine’s tweet alone, and amplified the lie to millions of additional views.

It’s not difficult to believe that Bitcoiners and many others in the wider crypto community chose to believe the fake scoop because of their predisposition against both Harris and Gensler.

Indeed, Harris’ rival Donald Trump is the only presidential candidate to have spoken at a Bitcoin conference or host a crypto gala. Moreover, while speaking at that conference, Trump received the loudest applause when he promised to fire Gensler — a promise so immediately popular that he repeated it to even louder applause.

Read more: How often does the SEC lose crypto lawsuits?

Reblogging a reblogged blog

Lazily, Bitcoin Magazine reporters didn’t originate this scoop but rather reblogged an article by Matthew Foldi, a Republican candidate for Congress and ex-National Republican Congressional Committee communications worker.

Worse, the publication obscured this fact, citing only “Senate sources” and making debunking the claim prohibitively difficult for the average reader.

Foldi claims to be an investigative journalist, yet his publication history reveals exclusively one-sided propaganda pieces at the Washington Free Beacon. Foldi’s only job there was apparently bashing Democrats.

The origin of the story looks to be a July 23 tweet by Republican Tom Emmer, House Majority Whip. On that date four weeks ago, Emmer tweeted his personal and unsubstantiated opinion, “Many people are concerned that Kamala Harris would appoint Elizabeth Warren or Gary Gensler to be her Treasury Secretary.”

Six days later, Foldi transformed this innocuous speculation into a July 29 article for the Washington Reporter, another pro-Republican publication. At this step of the fake news circuit, Emmer’s July 23 tweet had transformed into a ‘published’ interview between Foldi and Emmer in which Emmer simply repeated his personal speculation that Harris might nominate Gary Gensler or Elizabeth Warren to serve as US Treasury Secretary.

Finally, on August 19, Foldi published a second article, citing his July 29 article, claiming that that ‘citation’ proved that Emmer “warned that Harris may pick Gensler… to serve as her Treasury Secretary.”

As a rhetorical capstone, Foldi titled his article ‘Scoop: Kamala Harris likely to nominate Gary Gensler as Treasury Secretary if elected: Senate sources.’

As far as fake news cycles, it could not be more straightforward. A daisy-chain of citations leads to no factual basis except to fatigue average readers into simply reading and believing the final headline.

Read more: Donald Trump’s tweets moved crypto markets, now he’s back

Anti-Gary Gensler confirmation bias

Foldi’s propaganda worked — not because it was particularly clever, but because of confirmation bias — the psychological tendency to more readily believe information that conforms to one’s preexisting beliefs.

In crypto, it’s popular to dislike Gary Gensler and his work at the SEC. Similarly, Trump has campaigned on a pro-crypto platform, even though he often uses wordplay to deliver non-committal claptrap for his fans.

Combining those two preexisting biases — Trump as the supposedly pro-crypto and anti-Gensler presidential candidate — it was easy for a Republication communications professional to tap into confirmation bias with a fake news story.

Of course, Foldi wrote misleadingly, Harris would obviously be the presidential candidate to make an anti-crypto, pro-Gensler nomination choice if she were to win the race to the White House.

The idea aligns with preexisting Bitcoin and crypto confirmation biases perfectly. It also never happened.

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Donald Trump has returned to X (formerly Twitter), and Elon Musk welcomed him back with a personal interview yesterday.

Trump ranks as one of the most impactful tweeters of all time. He famously shifted the market capitalization of Amazon by $5 billion with a single tweet and has moved stock prices intraday of Ford, General Motors, Lockheed Martin, and many other public companies.

His tweets have power.

Case in point, on December 16, 2022, Trump endorsed an NFT collection, Trump Digital Trading Cards. One day later, the floor price of the collection hit an all-time high of 0.84 ETH. Nowadays, those NFTs resell below 0.10 ETH.

Trump also promoted a photo opportunity at a Bitcoin conference: $60,000 for a selfie, $100,000 for a couple’s photo, and $844,600 for a conference roundtable. Although that promotion raised $25 million, those tickets didn’t resell on secondary markets, so there’s no chart to display for this market impact.

Promoters like Martin Shkreli and media outlet Pirate Wires tried to jump onto the Trump crypto bandwagon, launching fake Trump tokens on various blockchains. There are unauthorized tokens with symbols like DJT, MAGA, MAGAA, DMAGA, and TRUMP trading on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Solana, PulseChain, Binance Smart Chain, and other blockchains. There are hundreds of unauthorized, Trump-themed meme coins, but traders should beware.

Read more: The entire DJT token drama in one article

Case study: Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC)

Returning to Trump himself, consider the staggering impact of his tweet on a publicly-traded crypto company that gained fame as Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC).

In 2020, when Jack Dorsey was CEO of Twitter, the platform’s staff suspended Trump’s account on several occasions. Dorsey eventually personally approved a permanent suspension of his account during the transition of presidential power to Joe Biden in January 2021.

By October 20 of that year, Trump had announced Truth Social. His new social media network was similar to Twitter, had fewer users, leaned Republican, wouldn’t ban the former president, and most importantly, pumped the stock price of DWAC.

Within two days of Trump’s announcement, the company’s shares on the Nasdaq stock exchange spiked from around $10 to $175. Today, those shares trade for less than $25 after a symbol change to DJT.

It was a classic pump and dump and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) eventually charged DWAC insiders with fraud. Commissioners prevailed with a cease-and-desist order and an $18 million civil penalty but opted not to charge Trump personally.

Crypto pays attention as Trump starts tweeting

On October 27, 2022, people began questioning the permanence of Jack Dorsey’s ban after Elon Musk purchased Twitter and took the company private. That speculation became a reality a month later when Musk reactivated Trump’s account. For nearly a year, however, Trump didn’t take advantage of his reinstatement.

Eventually, on August 24, 2023, Trump tweeted an image of his Fulton County, Georgia mugshot alongside various calls to action. The tweet would earn 313 million impressions — one of the most popular political tweets of all time.

Then, once again, Trump went silent. For another 11 months, he didn’t tweet, opting to post to Truth Social instead.

However, for the first time in nearly a year, the presidential candidate with 89 million followers is back.

Elon Musk tried to interview Donald Trump on X

To officially welcome Trump back to the platform, Musk scheduled a live social audio room on X for 8pm New York time on Monday. Right on schedule, the platform crashed. 

Complaints rained in. Musk disclaimed responsibility, blaming the outage on a “massive distributed denial of service attack.”

Someone created a Solana meme coin, ‘ELON TRUMP,’ to monetize the event. It was, of course, an unauthorized pump and dump.

Various refreshes of the room summary showed maximum attendees of approximately 210,000 people from 8-8:30 pm. It is unclear how many lucky attendees were actually hearing live audio during that half hour, if any.

Musk restarted the interview at 8:30pm with lobby music. Five minutes later, 850,000 people had joined, but the interview still hadn’t started.

Finally, Musk and Trump began their interview at 8:42 pm, with the attendee count displaying 984,000. Within an hour, listeners crested 1.3 million.

Despite an army of crypto traders listening in, Trump avoided the topic of crypto past 10:37 pm. The two men spoke of the Pennsylvania assassination attempt, immigration, inflation, taxes, foreign policy, armed conflicts abroad, electric generators, global warming, and other non-crypto matters.

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Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) is paying legal fees for a free speech lawsuit against Jack Dorsey’s company, Block. The irony is immediately obvious to long-time users of X: Dorsey co-founded Twitter, sold it to Musk so that he could focus on Block, and now X is paying to litigate against a Block employee.

Specifically, Chloe Happe v. Block Inc., involves a former Block employee who alleges that she was fired from her job at the company for statements she made on pseudonymous X accounts. She claims her two accounts were satirical and that she made the comments during private, non-working hours.

Nevertheless, despite the non-work related nature of these social media posts, Musk’s X is corporately funding her lawsuit against Block.

Don’t like Twitter censorship? Just buy it

Musk’s complaints against Dorsey’s version of censorship at Twitter were so great that he decided to simply acquire the platform outright. In 2022, Musk acquired Dorsey’s company in a transaction involving a group of investors.

Musk had previously criticized Twitter’s handling of obvious criminal activity like child exploitation while Dorsey was in charge. He now leads the censorship policy with plenty of examples of personal, editorial intervention.

Before Musk purchased Twitter, he vindictively promised to release ‘Twitter files’ that, in his opinion, would prove that Dorsey allowed politically motivated and US government-supervised content moderation on the platform. Musk was personally involved in revealing those files.

At the time, Dorsey fired back, criticizing Musk’s decision not to release all of these files at once, and questioning why he was involved in editorial decisions and crafting news media, rather than operating a social media platform for user (not owner) generated content.

Read more: Twitter is collapsing — and it’s hilarious

Even Dorsey had initially supported Musk taking the company private. Later, however, Dorsey said Musk’s decision was a mistake. “It all went south,” Dorsey lamented.

A regulatory filing did reveal that Dorsey retained a $1 billion stake in Twitter after it went private, maybe giving him a legitimate reason to be irked with Musk. That stake has shrunk precipitously, with X’s valuation dropping over 70% as of one post-acquisition financing round. Via this equity stake, Musk has caused Dorsey to lose money directly.

Not all conflict — they’re billionaires, after all

It’s not that Musk and Dorsey couldn’t cooperate on some things. Indeed, they both backed the Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund, for example, which helped Bitcoin developers successfully push back against Craig Wright’s torrent of lawsuits.

In another example, the two men had some back-and-forth over who actually controls so-called Web 3. Musk kidded about where he could find Web 3 — which barely exists. Dorsey cheekily agreed, placing it “between a and z,” a reference to venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Both men have had historical conflicts with general partners at a16z. Mark Andreessen, for example, blocked Dorsey after several disagreements.

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Crypto scammers are exploiting a four-year-old documented flaw in X (formerly Twitter) to impersonate celebrities and promote fake giveaways to steal crypto and NFTs.

The flaw, reported by Bleeping Computer back in 2019, involves a switch around in X URLs — which still register as twitter.com. It redirects users to crypto scams.

A Twitter URL consists of a person’s account name followed by a status ID, as follows: https://twitter.com/[account_name]/status/[status_id]. Crypto scammers can create an account imitating a public figure, post a phishing link, and change the account name of that post’s URL. This makes it appear as though the public figure is endorsing the post, particularly on mobile.

Read more: Musk Twitter scams pivot to paid ads that shill Mars trips and brain chips

Security researchers noted in 2019 that the URL exploit can be used for phishing campaigns and reportedly open up the potential for political misinformation and well-crafted social engineering. The URL feature is also reportedly standard to X and won’t likely change any time soon, meaning crypto scams are likely to keep occurring.

X is no stranger to crypto scams. Back when it introduced the verification checkmark, accounts would inflate their followers and rebrand themselves to someone real before blocking them and redirecting users to crypto scams.

Scammers also started buying fake ads on the social platform which promised free crypto, trips to Mars, and Neuralink brain chips, seemingly exploiting the hype around Elon Musk.

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Scammers who fooled anti-vaxxers into paying up to $500 in bitcoin for dodgy COVID-19 vaccine passes have reportedly raked in more than $280,000 in crypto, reports WIRED. 

Researchers at disinformation detection company Logically found over a thousand accounts on X (formerly Twitter) luring anti-vaxxers into Telegram channels where fake doctors attempt to sell various fraudulent medical documents. 

Logically claims that the anti-vaxxer scam network, stretching back to at least June 2022, has reached over 3 million people, made 62,000 posts, and processed $286,000 in crypto.

One scam group reportedly sells COVID-related travel passes for anywhere between $250 and $500 in bitcoin. Others play on anti-vaxxers’ “vulnerabilities to being paranoid about things like the next pandemic, or other kinds of vaccines” to offer false tuberculosis, tetanus, or polio results. 

Read more: Twitter verification is making scammers millions — here’s how

Of the 60 Telegram channels selling fake documents, 25 contain admins using a “Dr.” prefix, and 13 channels reportedly use the likeness of real medical professionals. One channel calls itself a “coalition of doctors” and its owner uses the name of a real plastic surgeon with roughly 50,000 social media followers. 

A Texas-based doctor being impersonated by the scammers told WIRED, “When people are able to take that likeness and use it for bad purposes, whether it’s fraud, whether it’s misinformation, I think it’s really scary.” They added that scammers can now use AI to make fake videos, making it “really hard for an average person to sort out if this is a fake account or not.”

Researchers claim it’s unlikely any buyers receive the documents they purchase and the operation is likely financially motivated.

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The biggest change to Twitter since Elon Musk’s takeover — the monetization of verification — appears to have been very costly for many crypto advocates and NFT collectors and a boon for phishing scammers.

According to a Twitter thread from @g13m, these scammers appear to be focusing much of their activity on individuals who are very young or very old, have problems with reading, or have other learning disabilities.

The scam goes something like this: a criminal — in this case, we’ll focus on a YouTuber and internet troll going by the name BlueXBT and JB’s Adventures — purchases verification (blue or gold) for a minimal amount of money (as is widely understood, a blue checkmark costs $8 a month and a gold check is $1,000 a month) and sets their name to be nearly identical to a well-known brand or individual.

Read more: Musk Twitter scams pivot to paid ads that shill Mars trips and brain chips

Once they’ve done this, they bump up their follower numbers using bots and spam, set their avatar and bio to be identical, and block the account they’re impersonating so as not to tip them off right away.

At this point, the scam is relatively easy to run, needing little more than an automated bot to reply to large accounts that tweet out regularly, and occasionally checking direct messages for marks. You’ll notice that large brand accounts attempt to fight this by posting a tweet at the end of a thread stating that any tweets below the final one are not from their account and are inevitably scams and spam. However, this alone isn’t enough to counter the problem.

When verification means Jack

While the former verification system obviously had serious issues — namely that there was very little transparency around who was verified and why — the monetization of verification has completely destroyed the meaning of a checkmark. This has allowed scammers to thrive.

While Musk assumed that putting a paywall between scammers and verification would hinder their endeavors, it has instead simply put a price on doing business. And it’s a price that scammers are more than willing to pay.

Indeed, in this latest reported scam, BlueXBT was able to steal over $200,000 worth of cryptocurrencies and NFTs from just one individual, 200Xing his initial investment in a single Twitter Gold verified account.

It’s unclear how Musk plans to solve this issue, as raising rates will make verification impossible for many simply from a fiscal standpoint, and doing nothing leaves scammers able to regularly phish and earn an income.

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The post Twitter verification is making scammers millions — here’s how appeared first on Protos.

Crypto Twitter has been charged with tracking down and preserving ‘spicy’ deleted tweets from Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong after the tech mogul apparently wiped all of his messages from the site.

It appears that The Wayback Machine — the trusted internet archive — has also scrubbed all evidence of Armstrong’s tweets.

The hunt’s instigator, pro-Bitcoin tweeter @Pledditor, says that the goal of the thread is to “find links via alternative archival services to all his old tweets” and has specified that the new archive should focus exclusively on “tweets with verifiable archive links.”

Pledditor also says that it should include tweets from between 2015 and 2018 because this was “when he posted all the spicy takes.”

Read more: Coinbase boss Brian Armstrong sorry for leaving retail users high and dry

The Internet Archive says that web users who want archives of their sites or accounts removed can make a request by sending an email specifying the URLs and time period that they wish to have deleted. However, it does also point out that these requests are subject to review and won’t necessarily result in records being expunged.

It’s clear why Armstrong might want some tweets deleting

The tweets recovered so far cover a range of topics, from mundane updates on the state of the company to more controversial takes on the future of Coinbase and crypto itself.

Among the highlights so far are Armstrong’s complaints about Coinbase’s removal from bitcoin.org, his suggestion for a for-profit Bitcoin fork, his claims that “altcoins are a distraction,” and his hyping of a 4% ETH pump after Coinbase listed it.

Read more: Justin Sun faces criticism for SEC tokens and inappropriate tweets

Armstrong isn’t the only crypto CEO who has cause to back-peddle where his social media is concerned.

Back in November 2022, Protos detailed how digital asset information platform The Tie had compiled a list of tweets deleted by former FTX chief Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). The list tracked all of SBF’s erasures over the preceding year along with many tweets from other people that he’d shared.

Then, back in April this year, Justin Sun’s exchange Poloniex published and then deleted a number of tweets touting an ‘SEC-focused token’ giveaway after crypto lawyers and Twitter users raised concerns.

Presumably, the new Armstrong tweet archive will be an ongoing project. You can keep up to date or submit your own entries here.

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The post Crypto Twitter won’t let you forget Brian Armstrong’s deleted tweets appeared first on Protos.

Through the tumult and dysfunction that has occurred like dominoes since 2019, there seems to be only one constant: billionaires convinced they know what’s best.

There’s a lot of reasons for this, not least of which is the erosion of public trust in the media. 

That said, it’s worth examining how billionaires and centimillionaires have somehow positioned themselves as the most trusted names in news – and why this may be a problem in the near future.

Elon buying Twitter: the billionaire’s mouthpiece

As soon as Elon Musk bought Twitter, it became clear that it would become his personal bullhorn. What wasn’t as obvious, however, was how much it would embolden fellow wealthy individuals – many involved with the Twitter takeover, like David Sacks and Jason Calacanis – to spout their mouths about every single topic, regardless of prior knowledge. Nevertheless, this is exactly what occurred.

The signal:noise ratio began to creep to an uncomfortable level early on in the acquisition, with Musk and the All In podcast crew instantly turning up the volume on Russia commentary, Bill Ackman, and Kevin O’Leary defending Sam Bankman-Fried, and a general push from the wealthy to suggest that Twitter was in better hands under new ownership.

But this was only the beginning of the rich showing off their abilities.

The collapse of SVB made the wealthy flex

When Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) asked for a capital injection from long-time shareholders and depositors to stave off a bank failure, the executive leadership clearly didn’t know who they were speaking to. Apparently very shortly after the request from leadership, Peter Thiel and a host of other billionaires and centimillionaires did exactly the opposite by withdrawing all the cash they could, immediately.

The ultra rich quickly took to Twitter, with people like Jason Calacanis taking pictures of bank lines in Southern California to stoke fears and ruffle feathers. Meanwhile, David Sacks repeatedly demanded the US government and FDIC promise to insure every cent of every deposit.

Needless to say, their loud commentary did little to benefit SVB or its depositors – instead helping to cause a catastrophic bank run, culminating in the complete collapse of the bank on March 10.

The public soon began to grasp the sheer magnitude of public discourse-shaping tools that the wealthy have at their disposal. Soon enough the All In podcast gang, Jack Dorsey, and Joe Rogan were all out endorsing and amplifying RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine, cell phone brain melting, and HIV/AIDS conspiracy theories across America, without any pushback or criticism.

Read more: Bluesky shares seed round, Threads launches, Twitter becomes money transmitter

To be clear: I have no doubt that the likes of the PayPal Mafia and the ultra-wealthy have long thought they know what’s best for everyone all the time, but instead of keeping their opinions to the pages of the op-ed section or paying gobs of money to fund think tanks and policy institutes, they’re now resorting to the one tool they hadn’t before – their own big mouths.

And while the opinions and altered realities of the ultra rich are easily mockable and often hilarious, they’re also incredibly annoying, and as the Jonathan Swift adage goes: falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.

When the wealthy actually do know

James Cameron’s estimated net worth is $800 million. He’s mostly known for directing some of the biggest box office grossing films of all-time, but on the side he’s become one of the most experienced and renowned submersible divers in the world.

As everyone’s attention turned to the tragedy of the Titan submersible unfolding in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, one person noticeably absent from the discussion was James Cameron — though media repeatedly mentioned that he had previously visited both The Titanic and reached the bottom of the deepest spot on Earth, the Marianas Trench.

Cameron was thoughtful enough to understand that his personal experience and understanding of deep sea dealings was of little use in the midst of a possible rescue operation, with numerous companies and countries working together to try and find the crew of Titan before they ran out of oxygen.

Once rescuers learned that the sub had imploded from pressure forces and the families of the deceased were notified, Cameron eventually took to the airwaves to discuss the likelihoods and concerns that had transpired before the ultimate end of the private submersible.

This is to say that Cameron didn’t insert himself into the conversation, he was asked numerous times by many media outlets to speak on a topic he was certain to be well-versed in and rather than take advantage of the bread and circus that was ongoing, he waited to express his expertise when it would do the least harm to the least amount of individuals possible.

Twitter’s collapse hurts news

The ongoing collapse of Twitter – from tweet viewing limits to Musk personally boosting numerous conspiracy theories — doesn’t help journalists and trusted news sources to spread verifiable facts, but it certainly helps push disinformation.

While actual news stories with objective information struggle to get likes and retweets, Musk replying with “interesting” or an emoji to blatantly false stories — like the hoax from the Santa Monica Observer — pushes millions of people to read nonsense.

This trend continues, with the likes of Mario Nawfal and Genevieve Roch-Decter — two individuals with dubious pasts and unclear journalistic credentials — hosting Spaces with hundreds of thousands of people and posting unverified stories regularly.

Unfortunately, it appears as though the ability to decipher between journalists and influencers, propagandists and news outlets, and financial advice versus shilling is only going to get more difficult in the months and years to come.

It also seems like the ultra wealthy are happy about this, pushing for it to happen faster than ever before, and are leaving the public with far more questions, far less answers, and almost no trust.

Maybe it’s worth asking which individuals and entities could benefit from a confused and distrusting public. And maybe, just maybe, it’s the centimillionaires, billionaires, and mega companies they control.

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This week has proven to be a busy one for social media platforms and their bigwig bosses. Twitter rival Bluesky announced an $8 million seed round on the eve of the launch of Threads, Meta’s own rival to Elon Musk’s bird website, just as Twitter announced it has secured a money transmitter license in several US states.

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky launched its beta release in February. On Wednesday, it shared a press release announcing an $8 million funding round, led by Neo, that would allow the firm to expand its team and grow the app.

Additionally, Bluesky shared news of its first paid service — custom domains.

“Domains have so much potential as a personalized way to customize identities and as a decentralized way to verify reputation that builds off the existing web,” Bluesky’s statement read.

The firm pointed out that while many of its users already customise their domains, such as US senators, the process “requires some familiarity with domain registrars and DNS settings.” Therefore, Bluesky has partnered with a firm to allow for “easy domain purchasing and management.”

Bluesky news comes amid Threads launch and Twitter win

The timing of Bluesky’s announcement is unlikely to be a coincidence. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta soft-launched Threads that same day — another rival to Twitter. According to Zuck himself, Threads surpassed two million sign ups in the first two hours. By the following morning, the Facebook and Instagram chief said that the new platform now had 30 million users.

Only, the launch has been marred by a road bump. Meta confirmed to Politico that the app wouldn’t launch in Europe just yet, due to EU tech laws such as the Digital Markets Act. This prevents large tech firms from mixing data across its different services.

Over in Elon Musk’s burning Twittersphere, a big win is no doubt being celebrated. Twitter received money transmitting licences in three US states: Michigan, New Hampshire, and Missouri. This allows the social platform to offer payment and transfer services, as part of Musk’s plans to increase monetization.

Sources indicate that the firm will launch fiat payment options first and eventually roll-out cryptocurrency payments. However, Twitter applied for a money transmitter license in all 50 states — it remains to be seen how fast these will be approved, if at all.

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