“Welcome Spain!”, greeted Jay Graber, the executive director of Bluesky, this Sunday. A social network created in the image and likeness of Twitter, but with an anti-millionaires shield, which is experiencing an exponential explosion of users. The Spanish community is one of those responsible for this: the platform has gone from seven million members in October to 15 million last Thursday. Since then it has grown at a rate of one million a day. But who is Jay Graber? Who else is behind the new fashion platform? Who finances it?
The story of Graber and Bluesky begins at the end of 2019. Social networks are at a turning point and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey believes that his platform may be one of the most affected. “The value of social networks is changing from simply posting and deleting content to recommendation algorithms that direct people’s attention,” he warned.
For Dorsey, the consequence of this trend on large listed companies such as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram itself was clear. “Existing incentives on social media often focus attention on content and conversations that generate controversy and outrage, rather than conversations that inform and promote health.”
“Unfortunately, these algorithms are usually proprietary, and you cannot choose or create alternatives. Still,” he says. It is the official announcement of a pilot project within Twitter that could avoid that future. As? Taking away from your own company the ability to absolutely dominate the algorithms that control the conversation.
The plan was to separate the data they generate from Twitter itself. That the users’ activity was carried out on an open protocol and their social network was one way to exploit them, but not the only one. Give each member the opportunity to break camp and go to another app if they didn’t like what they saw on Twitter. Decentralize the network.
“Why is this good for Twitter? “It will allow us to access and contribute to a much broader corpus of public conversations, focus our efforts on building open recommendation algorithms that promote healthy conversations, and will force us to be much more innovative than in the past,” he justified.
Dorsey, a strong defender of decentralized digital technologies, such as cryptocurrencies, believed that if Twitter took this step it could start a virtuous circle in which other networks would join the open and decentralized protocol, connecting with each other.
With this roadmap, the company organized a competition to create the team in charge of developing this new technological standard for social networks. He selected five system designers and architects to carry it out. The person in charge of leading it would be a 28-year-old engineer, Jay Graber.
Bluesky, the rebellious intern
Twitter financed the project with $13 million and it launched in December 2019. That was the first investment in Bluesky. It was set up as a “scholarship,” but Twitter did not control the initiative. “I had an advisory seat. But there was no well-defined structure. It was something like: we’re going to set aside this money, and whoever we hire can determine the best way to build this protocol,” Dorsey explained in an interview in 2024.
The founder of Twitter had already launched this strategy with other initiatives to develop decentralized protocols. One of them was the one that gave rise to Block, a financial company based on cryptocurrencies, of which Dorsey is president. Graber chose to loosen his ties with his mother.
Welcome Spain!
“Jay decided he wanted to establish a completely different entity,” Dorsey revealed last May. “That accelerated even further when Elon [Musk] he made the acquisition offer, and it quickly became a matter of survival, where he felt he needed to build a company, create a model around it, raise venture capital, form a board, issue shares and all those things.”
The project to save social networks turned its back on its founder and the platform that had given birth to it. “That was the first time I felt like, wow, this isn’t going in a direction that I’m really happy with, or that wasn’t the intention. “This was supposed to be an open source protocol that Twitter could eventually use,” says the businessman.
They are repeating the same mistakes we made on Twitter
Jack Dorsey
— Twitter founder
The months in which Musk tried to back out of his purchase of Twitter were key for Bluesky. The project to create a decentralized protocol for networks would become completely independent and would begin its journey alone. Without advertising and with minimal algorithmic impact. “What happened is that people started to see Bluesky as something to run away to, away from Twitter. “It’s what Twitter is not, and therefore it’s great,” continued Dorsey, who then still had a seat on Bluesky’s board of directors.
The young initiative continued to develop the decentralized protocol that was its initial mission (AT protocol), but at the same time, he also designed a social network to work on his technology. “Little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people out. And unfortunately, they went ahead with that,” says the Twitter founder.
Dorsey says that was the turning point. Bluesky was accepting money from venture capital to finance itself and agreeing to impose moderation mechanisms. In spring he left the board of directors and in September he even deleted his account: “They are repeating the same mistakes we made on Twitter.”
Crypto industry venture capital
Bluesky was flying solo and Twitter’s $13 million would soon fall short. The platform was restrained with spending in its early stages and went so far as to establish an invitation-based registration model to prevent avalanches of users like the current one from destabilizing it.
The network was not opened to the world until last February. Today it already has close to 20 million users with only 20 hired workers. In this period it has opened two rounds of financing, of 8 and 13 million dollars respectively. In both, crypto investors, attracted by the decentralized model proposed by Bluesky, such as SevenX Ventures, Protocol Labs or Blockchain Capital, have had a great weight.
The exact ownership structure of the company is unknown, as it is not publicly traded. Bluesky has made public that the round leader of its last financing round, closed at the end of October, was Blockchain Capital. It is one of the leading and most influential venture capital firms in the crypto industry with a presence on Coinbase (the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US) or OpenSea (the largest NFT market). In exchange, it has placed one of its partners on the board of directors of the social network.
“This fund has an exceptionally deep understanding of our decentralized foundation and has extensive experience building developer ecosystems, making it a natural partnership as we continue to invest in ATmosphere (the AT Protocol developer ecosystem),” Bluesky said.
Bluesky and the AT Protocol do not use blockchain or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyper-financialize the social experience (through tokens, cryptocurrency trading, NFTs, etc.)
Bluesky
— after its association with one of the main crypto funds
“This does not change the fact that the Bluesky app and AT Protocol do not use blockchain or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyper-financialize the social experience (through tokens, cryptocurrency trading, NFTs, etc.),” platform promises.
The blue sky network (a reference to the space where the Twitter bird was supposed to fly) has parted ways with Dorsey and its parent platform. Despite this, its new allies are pushing it towards a monetization model similar to that of avatar colors and frames.
Your next steps will mark your future. “Bluesky will always be free to use – we believe information and conversation should be easily accessible, not blocked. We will not upgrade accounts simply because they subscribe to a paid level,” says the young social network.
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