Decentralized lending platform Aave will build “Twitter on Ethereum,” its founder, Stani Kulechov, tweeted during the weekend. His message came seemingly in response to an announcement that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was developing a Bitcoin-oriented fintech platform resembling Aave.

Fast facts

  • Dorsey, who is also CEO of payments company Square, tweeted that the firm was starting a new business “focused on building an open developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless and decentralized financial services. Our primary focus is Bitcoin.”
  • Speculation surrounded Kulechov’s tweet before the plan was confirmed in a Decrypt article today, in which Kulechov said Twitter users “do not own” their audience, and that users of Aave’s new platform would be able to monetize their content. “Twitter makes all the revenue from your tweets and the content you share, and Twitter decides which of your tweets get traction through the algorithm,” he said.
  • Aave is a decentralized lending platform that allows users to lend or borrow cryptocurrency via smart contracts. It is currently the largest DeFi protocol by total value locked, worth US$10.92 billion according to DeFi Pulse data.