Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and musician Jay-Z pledged 500 bitcoin (about $ 23.3 million) to ₿trust, a donation to fund bitcoin development, Dorsey announced on Twitter today. The CEO said that the development will initially be focused on teams in Africa and India, but that he and Jay-Z plan to give “zero direction” to the plans. ₿trust is currently looking for three board members, with a registration form indicating that his mission is to “make bitcoin the currency of the Internet”.
Africa and India are two interesting markets where bitcoin development is concentrated. How TechCrunch notes that cryptocurrencies have become increasingly popular across the African continent to cheapen international transactions and, in some cases, resist government control. Nigeria is reportedly second only to the U.S. in terms of the amount of bitcoin traded in the country in the past five years.
JAY-Z /@S_C_ and I’m giving 500 BTC to a new donation called ₿trust to finance #Bitcoin development, initially focused on teams in Africa and India. It will be established as a blind and irrevocable trust, without our guidance. We need 3 board members to get started: https://t.co/L4mRBryMJe
– jack (@jack) February 12, 2021
Meanwhile, the Indian government is currently trying to ban private cryptocurrencies in the country, Bloomberg reports, as well as investigating the creation of an official digital currency. TechCrunch notes that the development of cryptocurrency in the country has been slow, despite its strengths in software development.
Dorsey always supports cryptocurrency and this is reflected in the actions of his companies. His payment platform company, Square, has accepted bitcoin as a form of payment since 2014 and announced that it bought $ 50 million in bitcoin last year as an investment in cryptocurrency.
At the time, Square said it believed that bitcoin could be the currency of the future and that cryptocurrency is an “economic strengthening tool”. Earlier this week, Twitter’s chief financial officer said the company was studying how it could pay its employees or suppliers in bitcoin in the future.
₿trust is the second largest bitcoin investment announced this week. On Monday, Tesla said it invested $ 1.5 billion in the cryptocurrency and hopes to use it as a payment method in the near future.