Former LA Dodgers owner spends $ 100 million on blockchain-based social media

Frank McCourt, a billion dollar real estate mogul and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, supports a new venture for a decentralized social media project based on blockchain technology.

McCourt is investing $ 100 million to reinvent the very foundation of the social network by building a publicly accessible database of people’s social connections on a blockchain, Bloomberg reported on Sunday.

Project Liberty aims to enable users to move records of their interactions between social media services rather than being tied to some dominant apps. The project will use blockchain technology to build a new internet infrastructure called Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP). The DSNP will keep records and connections of users in a similar way that blockchains keep data on cryptocurrency transactions.

This decentralized approach has the potential to weaken the power of content censorship by allowing users excluded from one platform to simply move their audience to more permissive platforms. The platform can also prevent bad behavior as people are forever tied to their posts as blockchain data is immutable, the report notes.

McCourt hired Braxton Woodham, co-founder of the food delivery service Sun Basket and former chief technology officer of the cinema ticket website Fandango, to build the DSNP. The billionaire businessman has pledged to invest $ 75 million in an institute at Georgetown University in Washington and Sciences Po in Paris to research technology, while the remaining $ 25 million will be used to support entrepreneurs building DSNP-based services will flow.

McCourt says the platform can address the current distribution of power on social media:

“We live in a state of constant surveillance, and what is happening to the vast accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a few is extremely worrying. It threatens capitalism because capitalism has to have some form of equity in order to survive. “

Connected: Jack Dorsey says he will integrate Lightning Network with Twitter or BlueSky

Since the advent of blockchain technology, a number of projects and companies have used distributed ledger technology on social media. In early June, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey revealed plans to integrate Bitcoin’s Lightning Network sidechain with Twitter or the decentralized social network BlueSky.

As previously reported, the EOSIO Voice-based social media project went live last year. Previously, a Yale professor and a Goldman Sachs veteran planned to develop a blockchain-based Facebook rival called Revolution Populi.