Billionaire real estate mogul Frank McCourt will invest $100 million in a project leveraging blockchain technology, attempting to democratize social media data.
According to a report by Bloomberg on Sunday, McCourt’s Project Liberty will focus on the development of a publicly accessible database of people’s social connections.
The hope is to encourage a more egalitarian approach by having social media companies, such as Facebook, draw from a shared place of social data.
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The project will utilize blockchain technology to build a new type of internet infrastructure dubbed the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP).
In a similar way to how blockchain stores information of certain coins and tokens in everyone’s wallets, so, too, will the DNSP but for social connections, per the report.
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Facebook’s stranglehold over the data it owns on social connections between its users currently provides the social media giant with a dominant position in the market.
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“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,” said McCourt. “It threatens capitalism because capitalism needs to have some form of fairness in it in order to survive.”
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