Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss fought a famous legal battle against Mark Zuckerberg for the beginnings of Facebook. Now, I predict the disappearance of the social network.
Harvard-educated twins – who were described by Armie Hammer as losers in the 2010 film “The Social Network” – have since become billionaires thanks to their bold investments in Bitcoin and other controversial cryptocurrencies.
In love with rising prices for digital money, as large companies from Tesla to Goldman Sachs embrace it, the pair now support the ante, arguing that “centralized” social networks like Facebook are not long for this world.
“The idea of a centralized social network will not exist for five or 10 years in the future,” Tyler Winklevoss told Forbes in a profile on Monday when asked about Facebook. “There is a membrane or a chasm between the old world and this new crypto-native universe. And we are the channel that helps people transcend offline to online. ”
The 39-year-old twins known as the “Winklevs” have filled their portfolios with startups trying to decentralize technology-dominated services like Facebook, Microsoft and Google with a digital art platform at the center. recent NFT madness, Forbes.
The twins entered the universe nearly a decade ago after winning a $ 65 million deal in their legal battle with Zuckerberg, which they accused of stealing their idea for a social network.
They started buying bitcoin in 2012 after receiving advice from several “early adopters” on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza, says Forbes. Now, Bitcoin and the so-called blockchain technology behind it is fueling a business empire that gave them a combined net worth of more than $ 6 billion last month, the press reported.
One of their biggest successes is Nifty Gateway, which has helped fuel the explosion in the market for non-fungible chips or NFTs, digital assets whose property is stored in a blockchain registry.
The platform saw an explosion of interest in its NFT “drops” from artists like Beeple, which just sold a token at Christie’s auction house for $ 69 million, according to Forbes.
“We’re making $ 4 million in five minutes now” for releases that would have brought in $ 50,000 a year ago, Cameron Winklevoss told Forbes.
Nifty Gateway was bought in 2019 by Gemini, Winklev’s cryptocurrency exchange, which shares its name with NASA’s second space mission. Gemini is so dedicated to space exploration that they call Gemini employees “astronauts,” Forbes said.
The pair would also have supported companies that want to create applications and services whose users are not subject to the whims of giant corporations.
One such company is Filecoin, which pays people in cryptocurrency to rent space on their hard drives as an alternative to centralized cloud storage, Forbes reports. There is also Stacks, an application platform that could power multiple projects, including a decentralized messaging service called Pravica.
“Over the next decade, you’ll see social protocols take off and people build decentralized forms of these services,” Tyler Winklevoss told Forbes.
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.