Billionaire real estate mogul and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Frank McCourt will invest $100 million in a project leveraging blockchain technology, attempting to democratize social media data.
The effort, which Frank McCourt has loftily named Project Liberty, centers on the development of a publicly accessible database of people’s social connections, enabling users to move records of their relationships between social media services in lieu of being locked into a few dominant apps.
The venture will make use of blockchain technology to create a new type of internet infrastructure - the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP). DNSP will store and process information in a similar way to how blockchain stores information of certain coins and tokens in everyone’s wallets, for social connections, per the report.
Frank commented "We live under constant surveillance, and what’s happening with this massive accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a few, that’s incredibly destabilizing. It threatens capitalism because capitalism needs to have some form of fairness in it in order to survive."
According to Frank, currently, FB owns the data about the social connections between its users, giving it an excessive advantage over competitors. But in a system where all social media companies drew from a common social graph they would have to compete by giving even better services, as well as the chance of any single company becoming so dominant would downturn.
McCourt has hired Braxton Woodham to build DSNP, who is the co-founder of the meal delivery service Sun Basket and former chief technology officer of Fandango, the movie ticket website.
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