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.
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.
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.
“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.”
