Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and musician Jay-Z have pledged 500 bitcoins (approximately $ 23.3 million) to ₿trust, a donation to fund bitcoin development. Dorsey announced on Twitter today. The CEO said the development will initially target teams in Africa and India, but he and Jay-Z intend to give the plans “zero direction”. Trust is currently looking for three board members, with an application form stating its mission is to “make bitcoin the currency of the Internet.”
Africa and India are two interesting markets that bitcoin development can focus on. Like TechCrunch notes that cryptocurrencies have become increasingly popular across the African continent as they make cross-border transactions cheaper and in some cases can withstand government scrutiny. Nigeria is said to be second only to the US in terms of the amount of bitcoin traded in the country over the past five years.
JAY-Z /@RTLnews and I am giving 500 BTC to a new donation called Trust to finance #Bitcoin development, initially aimed at teams in Africa & India. It will be set up as a blind, irrevocable trust, without any direction from us. We need 3 board members to start: https://t.co/L4mRBryMJe
– jack (@jack) February 12, 2021
Meanwhile, the Indian government is currently looking to ban private cryptocurrencies in the country, Bloomberg reports, while also investigating the creation of an official digital currency. TechCrunch notes that cryptocurrency development in the country is slow, despite its strengths in software development.
Dorsey has been a longtime proponent of cryptocurrency, and this is reflected in the actions of his companies. Its payment platform company Square has been accepting bitcoin as a form of payment since 2014 and announced that it had purchased $ 50 million worth of bitcoin as an investment in cryptocurrency last year.
Square said at the time that it believed that bitcoin could be the currency of the future and that cryptocurrency is an “instrument of economic empowerment”. Earlier this week, Twitter’s chief financial officer said the company was investigating how it could pay its employees or sellers in bitcoin in the future.
Trust is the second major investment in bitcoin announced this week. On Monday, Tesla said it had invested $ 1.5 billion in the cryptocurrency and hoped to use it as a payment method in the near future.