How did the Twitter purchase go down?

In a recent interview, Zhao said he welcomed the freedom of speech that Musk plans to introduce on Twitter. In addition, Binance will help the social platform with the integration of Web3 innovations.

As a reminder, Web3 is the new generation of the internet, characterised by the absence of large corporations making money from users' personal data. Instead, the average person is at the centre of power thanks to blockchain. They can prove their identity with a blockchain address, have full ownership of content thanks to NFT tokens, and earn money from their own activity.

Twitter, despite its scale and audience reach, has its problems. The Binance chief noted that he is committed to making efforts to solve them. Here is Chanpen’s rejoinder, cited by Cointelegraph.

I think Twitter is poorly monetised, slow to develop, there are a lot of tactical problems there. For example, there are bots that spam my comments, there are also fraudulent accounts – it’s all difficult to manage. But I think the platform has tremendous value on its own, and especially now that Ilon is at the helm.

Binance CEO Changpen Zhao

Recall that Musk’s lawyers and Twitter’s board of directors have been unable to come to a consensus on the price and terms of the deal for months. In spite of this, Binance has not abandoned its intentions – representatives of the exchange expressed support for the initiative of Ilon back in May this year. Zhao himself believes that the long-term benefits of buying the platform are more relevant in this case. He continues.

We are long-term investors, we believe in strong entrepreneurs, we believe in strong platforms, we believe in free speech. We look at it from a planning horizon of 10, 20, 50 and 100 years, so small price swings every month don’t bother us.

Zhao’s tweet confirming the deal

Another important point of the interview is that Changpen wants to play a prominent role in Twitter’s future business model. Specifically, the exchange’s head plans to introduce cryptopayments that would be convenient even for those far from crypto users of the platform. And that’s very good news, as such a move would do a lot to popularise digital assets.

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Binance is not the only company that has “reached out” to Ilo Musk. The management of major venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has also promised to make Twitter better. Shriram Krishnan, a16z’s lead partner, shared a photo from Twitter’s San Francisco office with a note that he is “temporarily helping Ilon Musk along with some other great people.

Me and a16z think this is a very important company that can have a big impact on the world. Ilon is exactly the right person to make that happen.

Note that Musk has already made some controversial decisions. In particular, now the blue checkmark confirmation will cost $ 8 per month, which means that in fact anyone can buy it. Elon believes that such innovation will rid the network of bots, because their creators allegedly can not afford to pay for further deception of users and "earn" on them. However, experience shows that some fraudsters are laying out tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars to hack popular accounts. One of the most recent was the account of Beeple, the author of the most expensive NFT token.

Twitter office photo shared by Sriram Krishnan on his page

Krishnan has visited the company’s headquarters before. As indicated on his LinkedIn page, he worked at Twitter for three years from 2017 to 2019. During that period, Krishnan worked on various consumer products like the Events feature within the social platform. His profile also states that he helped increase Twitter’s user base by more than 20 per cent in about two years. Before Twitter, Krishnan worked at Snap, Facebook and Microsoft.

Admittedly, it’s not yet clear exactly what one of Andreessen Horowitz’s high-profile jobs will be. Journalists at Decrypt news outlet have tried to contact Krishnan, but he has yet to comment on any collaboration with Musk. It’s likely that a16z is also interested in integrating crypto and Web 3 into Twitter – the venture capital firm has many projects related to these areas in its portfolio.


We believe that the main goal of the cryptocurrency companies and funds that sponsored this deal is to further promote digital assets and introduce coin-related features into the social platform. In this way, Twitter will introduce its users to the basics of the crypto world and try them out at the same time. After all, Musk has already implemented DOGE in The Boring Company's tunnel system, which means there is also a place for coins in the social network.