Silicon Valley Daily

Bluesky raises $15M in Series A on a userbase of 13M. 

Led by... drumroll please... Blockchain Capital!

Feels like a parallel universe.

Building /bright-moments - minting onchain art IRL | /purple #15 | FID 129 #magikarp

Rome, Metropolitan City of Rome Capital, Italy

To be fair, while Bluesky isn’t using blockchain or cryptocurrency in any way, they do use technologies developed by Filecoin/IPFS and the CEO is a former Zcash dev. It’s not like they’re ignorant about blockchain they just don’t see a meaningful way for it to be involved outside of speculation. And it’s refreshing to have different approaches be taken, because most of what blockchain has done on FC isn’t overtly meaningful to everyday consumers and the way Lens uses blockchain is almost entirely speculative and money-grabbey. Hopefully they will employ blockchain for identity in the future and find other ways to leverage the tech, but I see no reason they would explicitly need to.

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Thanks, and well said. I think we are all trying to solve an important problem: how do we build decentralized and data-portable social networking protocols. It’s hard and what’s interesting is that the best protocol design (I’m a big fan of Farcaster’s design personally), does not guarantee success. There are many factors, and Bluesky, which combines a sort of middle ground of protocol design between Mastodon and Farcaster, has done one thing really well, which is addressing content most at scale in a user-controlled way. I’m intrigued to see what else they will build and it’s not a good idea to write off this team or their approach regardless of what tech they do or do not use.

this is the right take

I think they’re dead wrong for not using blockchain for identity

and for missing how much it can help with data portability / ownership

but I’m happy to have a diversity of perspectives getting funding

the team seems talented and they have a solid wedge