Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss fought a famous legal battle against Mark Zuckerberg over the start of Facebook. Now, they are predicting the end of the social network.
The Harvard-educated twins – who were portrayed 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.
Encouraged by rising digital money prices as big companies like Tesla and Goldman Sachs embrace it, the pair is now stepping up, claiming that “centralized” social networks like Facebook don’t last long in this world.
“The idea of a centralized social network will simply not exist five or ten years in the future,” Tyler Winklevoss told Forbes in a profile on Monday when asked about Facebook. “There is a membrane or an abyss between the old world and this new crypto-native universe. And we are the channel that helps people to transcend offline to online. “
The 39-year-old twins known as “Winklevii” have filled their portfolio with startups trying to decentralize services dominated by tech titans like Facebook, Microsoft and Google alongside a digital art platform that is at the heart of the recent NFT craze, according to Forbes.
The twins reportedly entered the universe almost a decade ago, after winning a $ 65 million settlement in their legal battle with Zuckerberg, whom they accused of stealing his idea of a social network.
They started buying bitcoin in 2012, after receiving a tip from some “first users” on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza, Forbes said. Now, Bitcoin and the so-called blockchain technology behind it boost a business empire that gave them a combined net worth of more than $ 6 billion last month, reports the outlet.
One of its biggest successes is the Nifty Gateway, which helped drive the explosion in the market for non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, digital assets whose property is stored in a blockchain ledger.
The platform saw an explosion of interest in its NFT “downfalls” by artists like Beeple, who just sold a token at the Christie auction house for $ 69 million, according to Forbes.
“We are making $ 4 million in five minutes now” for releases that would have earned $ 50,000 a year ago, Cameron Winklevoss told Forbes.
The Nifty Gateway was purchased in 2019 by Gemini, the Winklevii cryptocurrency exchange that shares its name with NASA’s second space mission. The twins are so dedicated to the topic of space exploration that they call Gemini employees “astronauts,” they told Forbes.
The duo also 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 cryptocurrencies to rent space on their hard drives as an alternative to centralized cloud storage, reports Forbes. There is also Stacks, an application platform that reportedly powers several projects, including a decentralized messaging service called Pravica.
“In the next decade, you will see social protocols taking off and people building decentralized forms of these services,” Tyler Winklevoss told Forbes.
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.