What Jack Dorsey's Stepping Down as Twitter CEO Means for Crypto

Jack Dorsey has officially stepped down as the CEO of Twitter. The reins to lead the social media platform now rest with Parag Agarwal, whose work Jack considers to be "transformational."

Dorsey’s own rationale behind moving away from the social media platform is to remove any "single point of failure" — sounds pretty crypto, right?

When Dorsey first announced that he was stepping down, there was massive speculation about who was going to be the successor — and there was a massive 10% uptick in Twitter's stock price as speculations brewed across the Twitter-sphere.

However, the rumors were settled when Parag Agrawal was announced as the successor.

Dorsey stepping down means a lot of things, but there is one pertinent question that has stood out to many people in our industry — what does this mean for crypto overall?

And that is exactly what we will explore in this quick article. Let's dive in.

Do Jack’s Cryptic Tweets Show Us the Answer?

Dorsey sent out some cryptic tweets, which the Twitter-sphere wanted to decode but was hard-pressed for an answer. The first one was just a number, 705742.

Blockchain.com was quick enough to jump in and unveil that this was a number of the Bitcoin block that was just mined prior to the tweet being published. Some speculated that the number was Jack's "prediction" on when Bitcoin would hit its all-time high (ATH). A series of tweets followed that were interpreted as Dorsey’s prediction of the ATH for Bitcoin. While there is certainly a lot that can be taken from what he said, these tweets don't necessarily give a clear picture of what exactly he was hoping to convey with it — to put it plainly, they don’t really tell us anything at all.

There are other factors, however, that give a better indication of what Dorsey moving away from Twitter actually means.

Jack and His Love for Bitcoin

Dorsey was also heading the Twitter-organizzed project, BlueSky, which is an attempt to decentralize social media platforms by following some openly accessible standards (just like your next cryptocurrency protocol) so users can communicate amongst each other without fearing the existence of any boundaries.

Speaking of boundaries, the company has been pretty considerate towards its employees — especially when it comes to their own contribution to the company — by announcing that all employees have the option to work from home for an indefinite period of time. This kind of relaxation again stems from Dorsey’s affinity for a decentralized world where every participating member in a network (in this case, the company) has the power to decide what they want.

Leading Square to the Next Crypto Revolution

The company has repeatedly outlined several steps that it intends to take towards the direction of creating cryptocurrency-related services.

• It has released a whitepaper detailing how tbDEX, a decentralized exchange (DEX), will be a platform for users to trade cryptocurrencies.
• A couple weeks ago (in October 2021) Jack Dorsey announced that Square also wanted to get into the Bitcoin mining business. While the details have to be worked out, the price of the cryptocurrency saw an instant jump right after Jack issued these tweets.
• There were also talks of the company creating a custom hardware wallet to make the custody of cryptocurrencies safer.
• Additionally, the company also has considerable investments in Bitcoin — a total of $351.7M as of September 2021.

We are yet to see a clear path of how the various objectives that the company has outlined for itself would pan out. However, there is an inherent congruence to what the company is saying and doing surrounding crypto, even without Dorsey. This in itself is a reassuring indication that it is indeed focused on curating decentralized services for their users.

Closing Thoughts

Cryptocurrencies are not new to Jack Dorsey. He has been a fervent supporter of Bitcoin and has been focused on creating a decentralized ecosystem for years now.

The decision to move away from Twitter in order to support decentralization – and this coming from the CEO of a top social media platform — speaks volumes about his personal connection to the core principles of the emerging industry and how he wants to be at the center of the revolution as well. Whether Square gets into mining, creates a hardware wallet or creates an infrastructure for DeFi on Bitcoin (or all of the above!) it will be interesting to see how the entire narrative unfolds and where Dorsey goes next.