What Crypto Can Expect From Twitter’s New CEO

In the wake of Jack Dorsey’s November 29 announcement that he would step down as Twitter CEO, one particular section of the social network’s user base reacted with a mix of despondency and pessimism. It was Crypto-Twitter—or CT—a vast subculture of developers, startup founders, thinkers, bloggers, influencers, and speculators who spend their days tweeting about Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, blockchain, decentralization, and scams.

Some CT members had long regarded Dorsey as a key ally, not only because of his enthusiasm for crypto technology (Dorsey’s Twitter bio reads simply #bitcoin), but also for his broadly libertarian stance on free speech and moderation on the platform. CT, a community deeply influenced by libertarian and anti-censorship thinking, was worried that Dorsey’s successor as CEO, former chief technology officer Parag Agrawal, would not be as stalwart a defender of free speech—an impression that was immediately confirmed by Twitter’s November 30 decision to forbid the sharing of images or videos of private individuals without their consent. An article on former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss’ Substack, titled “Twitter Is About to Get Way Worse” was retweeted by many accounts specialized in cryptocurrency musings.

Nic Carter, a general partner at the Castle Island Ventures VC firm focused on crypto investments, was one of them and called the succession “not positive for [Twitter]” in a separate tweet. “I'm very concerned by [Dorsey’s] departure: I think Twitter will lose his support from the top to keep it a largely unencumbered platform—and I do think it'll be more aggressively policed under Parag's leadership,” he says in an interview. “Crypto Twitter is made up of a lot of anonymous accounts. And that's part of the model: You don't necessarily want to reveal to the world that you own cryptocurrency. But I think there's a possibility that Twitter becomes far more censorious and makes it much more difficult to operate [for those accounts.]”

Yet this mistrust is tempered by awareness that Agrawal’s efforts over the past few years have focused squarely on crypto projects. As of December 2, out of the 1,340 accounts Agrawal follows on Twitter, 55 feature cryptocurrency-related terms in their handles, names, or bios; 11 sport a profile picture featuring the “laser eyes” effect (a Bitcoinist shibboleth); and six have NFTs as their profile pictures. Major personalities from the scene, ranging from decentralized finance developer Andre Cronje to pro-Bitcoin Wyoming senator Cynthia Lummis, are also among Agrawal’s follows. Dorsey was very vocal about his obsession with Bitcoin, but his conversion happened gradually when he was already on the job. Agrawal might have been less of an evangelist, but he is taking over Twitter's helm as a fully crypto-pilled CEO. (Twitter's communication office did not respond to a request for comment.)

Of course, few people would know that. Despite having spent a decade at Twitter, Agrawal is not particularly well known, even among Twitter employees, besides the basic facts of his former CTO title and his pedigree as a sterling engineer. Kevin Weil, a technology entrepreneur who used to work as Twitter’s senior vice president for product, describes Agrawal as a “strong first-principles thinker.” A person who has worked with Agrawal in the past but is not authorized to talk to the press by their current employer says Agrawal “clearly loves crypto, [but] unlike Jack [Dorsey], he just doesn’t tweet about it much.”

Indeed, as recently as November 2019 Agrawal was still self-styling himself as “crypto-naive” during a fireside chat held on Twitter’s campus with cryptocurrency entrepreneur Joseph Lubin. Just over a week later, Agrawal joined Dorsey on a trip to Nigeria, where Agrawal met with the local Bitcoin community. Chris Maurice, CEO of the exchange YellowCard, who attended the meetups, recalls Agrawal—like Dorsey—being “extremely inquisitive” about the subject. “They had a heavy preference for listening and learning, as opposed to being the center of attention,” Maurice recalls.

A few months later, Agrawal was instrumental in spearheading bluesky, a Twitter-funded initiative to develop a protocol—potentially underpinned by a blockchain—to build decentralized social networks, with a view to replacing proprietary platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. The project was initially run out of a private server on Matrix, a secure communication platform, before moving to a public Discord channel. Evan Henshaw-Plath, a former lead developer at Odeo, the podcast publishing platform from which eventually Twitter was spun out, and who was also on the bluesky server, says Agrawal was not allowed to actively write on the server but was still there, “lurking, more observing, more listening than strongly pushing through his agenda.”

In Henshaw-Plath’s opinion, the choice of appointing Agrawal as CEO signals that Twitter is going to work seriously 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 internal politics as a constant duel between technologists like Dorsey pushing for a more open, decentralized structure and businesspeople focused 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 people in crypto do not see Agrawal’s involvement in bluesky as a badge of merit. Carter says the project has a reputation for being slow-moving. “It is kind of stagnant,” he says. More generally, he is skeptical about the chances that a company like Twitter—especially after Dorsey’s departure—could genuinely bring about 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 investment consultancy Quantum Economics, is similarly 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 needs to be slow, for its own 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 own temperament, which he describes as that of a “thoughtful consensus-builder,” means he will be able to make Twitter a powerful force in developing such technologies.

“You don't get this done by someone who is a Steve Jobs character,” he says, referring to the late Apple founder’s imperious style. “This job is about recruiting people, about getting everyone on the same page, about understanding the hard technical and social problems and getting the teams to work together.” He praises Agrawal’s and Dorsey’s August 2021 decision to appoint Jay Graber—formerly of privacy-protecting cryptocurrency Zcash—to lead bluesky as perfect.

“When bluesky was launched, there were a ton of people who had strong cryptocurrency backgrounds who got involved; they wanted the payment stuff to be central,” he says. “Jay is more privacy-focused, she has a more political vision of how you would achieve decentralization—as opposed to a purely economic libertarian view.”

We can probably expect more of that from Agrawal. While Dorsey and Agrawal are by all accounts friends and share a similar leadership style, one big point of difference between the former and current CEO is what they want out of crypto. With Dorsey—who just rechristened his payment company Square as Block—it is all about payments and Bitcoin; for Agrawal, that's not necessarily the case.

“I haven't heard Parag talk as much about Bitcoin versus the larger cryptocurrency ecosystem,” Henshaw-Plath says. “Jack is a particularly strong proponent of Bitcoin and has put a lot of money in research into [transaction-accelerating] Lightning Networks and making Bitcoin work. I have no indication, from my conversations with Parag, about where he lies on Bitcoin versus Ethereum versus other alternative cryptocurrency ecosystems. I couldn't even say what vision he has.”

“[With Agrawal], it is all about decentralization and opening up and building interesting things, rather than specific projects,” says Henshaw-Plath.

That is not to say that Bitcoin is banished from Agrawal’s pantheon. After all, he oversaw the launch of Twitter’s Tipping feature, which allows users to receive Bitcoin payments—over the Lightning Network—as a reward for content. And until his ascension to CEO, the head of Twitter’s newly launched crypto unit reported to Agrawal. We can also expect Twitter to create a feature that will allow CT users to “verify” their profile picture if it is linked to an NFT they own. “If they do push that live, that would be very strong,” Carter says. “For the first time, you could really utilize your NFT on a major platform, and in a crypto-native way.”

All of this suggests that CT’s worries might be overblown. The common thread running throughout Agrawal’s career is that he is perfectly aligned with Dorsey on most if not all major questions; you could even call him a Dorsey loyalist. The two, Henshaw-Plath says, even share similar personal histories. “Parag’s trajectory parallels Jack’s,” he says. “Parag started at Twitter as just an engineer on the ads team; he started at the bottom and worked his way up. Jack started at Odeo as just an engineer on the team and likewise became the lead for Twitter and then the CEO for Twitter through his work—and through being a fantastic programmer.”

That does not mean that Agrawal will be painstakingly retracing whatever Dorsey did—some things are necessarily going to change. “I don’t think Jack is going to be the shadow CEO,” says Henshaw-Plath. But at least concerning crypto, we can expect Agrawal to be as energetic as Dorsey—if not more—in pushing Twitter’s agenda forward.

In the meantime, CT will have to work though its bereavement over the loss of the Rasputinesquely bearded, nose-ringed, Bitcoin-touting evangelist at the helm of its social network of choice. As Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer of the Human Rights Foundation and a key Bitcoin proponent, puts it, Dorsey’s departure feels like “the end of a golden era.”

“But before leaving, Jack must have felt that Twitter was in a good place, that it was starting to be connected to Bitcoin, and to decentralization,” he says. “Twitter will be fine in the hands of Parag.”