Real Estate Mogul to Spend $100M on Decentralized Social Networking Protocol

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.

See also: New Social Media Platform Instars Leverages Privacy-Enhancing Cryptography

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.”