TikTok's Potential Shift to Decentralized Social Media Platform

TikTok's potential sale could catalyze a shift towards decentralized social media using blockchain technology.

### TikTok's Potential Shift to Decentralized Ownership and Web 3.0
* 📱 TikTok is facing a potential ban in the U.S. due to **national security concerns** regarding its Chinese ownership, which could lead to a new owner with ties to **cryptocurrency**.
* ⚖ A key court hearing is underway, where TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, argues that a **forced sale would violate their First Amendment rights**, while the government insists on a **change of ownership to mitigate risks**.
* 🌐 Project Liberty, led by Frank McCourt, aims to create a **decentralized alternative to TikTok**, leveraging a **decentralized social networking protocol (DSNP)** built on **Polkadot's architecture**.
* 🔗 The project has tested across 30 blockchains, ultimately choosing **Polkadot for its suitability**, which could **revolutionize Web 3.0 social media** if TikTok adopts this framework.
* 💰 McCourt's initiative is supported by institutions with **trillions in assets**, emphasizing a **collective ownership model** that **empowers users and protects their data**.
* 🔄 The potential transition to a **decentralized platform** raises questions about the future of existing social media giants like **Meta and Twitter**, and whether they will **follow suit**.
* 📈 As the court deliberates, the outcome could **significantly impact the U.S. economy**, especially considering TikTok's influence on **creators and businesses**.
* 🔍 The case highlights the ongoing tension between **national security and free speech**, with implications that may extend to the **Supreme Court**, further shaping the landscape of **social media and cryptocurrency integration**.

[Music] TikTok is about to enter the cryptosphere and do it in a very interesting way. Today, you don't want to miss this one because we're going to break it all down for you. My name is Paul Bear, and welcome back to Tech Path. Let's get started. I do want to kind of preempt this a little bit, and that is, we're going to be talking about a project out there that you guys will recognize, one, of course, Polkadot, and also TikTok. Now, Polkadot is a channel partner, but based on breaking news, this was a full research package that we put together for you guys. So, I want to start it off right here by the TikTok ban heard today. This happened actually today on Monday in court, and there's quite a bit happening within it. Now, this is the frame of, for some of you maybe that don't know what's happening here, this was a scenario where the potential government, U.S. government, could ban the use and operation of TikTok here in the United States from bite

Dan, the Chinese potential Chinese owner. If that were to happen, the likelihood is a devastator, and a devastator is probably going to mean that we're going to see a new owner. The new owners are getting kind of interesting because it could be more related to crypto than you think. I want to go to this first clip to kind of set this up. P TikTok's parent company faces a key court hearing today to stop a possible ban or sale of the app in the United States by January 19th. A potential buyer hopes to change the app's experience for its 170 million US users. Joining us right now is that potential buyer, Frank McCourt from Project Liberty. He's the founder there. We don't know how the court is going to rule or how courts will rule in this situation. If it comes up for sale, though, my guess would be you are not the only bidder who'd be interested in taking this on. What backing do you have? What money do you... Yeah, I would assume not. I would assume

there would be others as well. We call our bid the people's bid, which is to bring lots of people together to buy the platform, not because I want to be the CEO of a social media platform. I'd like to see 170 million Americans move over to an alternative to the current Internet we have, one that is not surveilling them, is not scraping their data, is not manipulating them, one where it's a permission base. We offer up our data in on on, and we have agency and control and receive some of the value for that. We're now in conversations with institutions that have trillions of dollars on their balance sheets that are very interested in this project and the outcome. If it's not TikTok that you're able to buy, will you start something like that on your own? Yes, and we're doing that anyway. We can't rely on the fact that we're going to be successful buying TikTok. We now have over a million people on this alternative internet, so we know the technology works, which was fairly

daunting to start with, but now adoption and migration is key, Becky, and that's why we're looking for the 170 million users. It's really very fortuitous that this asset might be available because it would catalyze a new engine. All right, so what he's getting at there is really kind of the idea behind web 3. In fact, it's one of the reasons our very channel exists, and that's talking about the future of technology going into a decentralized platform. And if that were to take place, you look at the tech teams behind this project. This is being project Liberty, implementation of a decentralized social networking protocol, DSNP. Frank McCourt, this was the guy on the clip right there, basically says, Hey, this is what we're going to do to be able to decentralize social media. Now, DSNP has a very interesting point here that was made in this outline of what they're doing. I want to go to a highlighted section here because this is important right here. They were developing this on Ethereum. There was a

little bit of a problem with Ethereum, so they went out and tested this across 30 different blockchains. Now, 30 different blockchains mainly was looking at the potential and guessed what blockchain was the one that they stuck with, and that was Polkadot's architecture, which is extremely well-suited to implement DSNP. So, decentralized social media is a huge opportunity. If TikTok actually gets this framework put into place, this would immediately supercharge the potential of Web 3 social media, and that would change quite a bit. Just to take a look at some of the chains that they looked at, this was in January of '22. Let me zoom in on that for you guys. There was quite a few in here, including Avalanche, which is the one I think that would have been really good, but at that time, Avalanche was very new on their main architecture and what they were trying to do. We talked about it quite a bit, but look at all of the different chains that were reviewed, and I think this is a pretty big potential for

the future of where decentralized social media is going to be going. I want to go to another clip real quick, and this one gets into a little bit around whether or not they're going to have a token, and if they don't have a token, what would be the play if you're looking at a crypto angle. Take a look, you guys strike me as kind of an unlikely couple, right? Odd Couple, I mean, if you don't mind me saying so. You know, Gavin is from England, as you may have gathered, and was one of the co-founders of Ethereum, which is no small thing there. And today, we all know, and Frank has mentioned it several times, that in Web 2, we the people, we are the product. But unfortunately, in Web 3 right now, we the people, we are the exit liquidity. So, what needs to change for Web 3 to change so it's more closer to your vision, what you had envisaged, rather than what is happening now? I would also add that DSMP, you're having a

core Internet Protocol that's not tokenized, that's a piece of a common good, is really important as well. There are pieces of the internet that should be public, in my opinion, and then you can build privatized commercial things on that. But right now, we have pieces of the internet that should be public that are private, so much like what the web 2 architecture, and if you go back all the way to web one when we started to really see the evolution of the worldwide web, a lot of that on the vision of guys like Tim Berners-Lee, etc. I think this might be that next acceleration, which is kind of the internet Point 2.0. And I think this is the point that I'm getting at, is that if this does occur, decentralized social media is going to be a real thing, and most likely a decentralized web could be reality, and that could be everything from payments, and you get the idea around everything from world assets, etc. This is one of the examples.

of a web2 social media platform, and this is one that has been out there for a little bit. It's called Miwe, and they host currently around 20 million users worldwide, 700,000 interest groups, etc. Now, it's not a major, but the point that I want to make with this is this one flipped from a web two to a web 3 platform, and right here is their discussion on it. Exciting news starting September 20th, just around the corner here, all Miwe accounts will be moving to the Social Web. Update your account, keep it active, only 30 seconds. So very quickly, we've seen this kind of transition and this kind of movement. What does this mean for the existing social media platforms? Does it mean that Elon and X and Zuckerberg and Meta could be going in this direction? Who knows? If you start to see traction and we start to see implementation, especially around the idea of a true decentralized Social Web, this could be a pretty big deal. Now, this is the way it

works right now. This is Project Liberty page people's bid for Tik Tok. Remember back in the front of the clip though he mentioned trillion doll asset managers. Not too many trillion dollar asset managers so you kind of can guess who that might be that are backing this organization people's bid for Tik Tok. And you think about this from a standpoint of the amount of companies creators Etc here in the United States especially the Western countries that are involved in Tik Tok. There would be a massive hit on the economy if Tik Tok were taken down. I don't think it's necessarily going to be taken down. I think it's going to be devasted and most likely it could be maybe in reference to Liberty that is going to be the player here. Now I want to go to another clip here because this will get in to how and why this will happen and this is referenced to their court case. Take a look what this is on Monday is the lawyers for the justice department for bite Dan Tik Tok. They're going to get the chance to go before a

judge as is a party of users who have a stake in the game here either Tik Tok you divest to a US owner or it's banned in this country. Now Tik Tock is saying that that law is unconstitutional. They say it's a violation of the company's right to free speech under the First Amendment. And they say it's a violation of their users' right to free speech under the First Amendment. They've also said that the parent company ByteDance will not allow for its algorithm to be divested to a US company. That's really the bread and butter of the way that the app works. So the court is going to look at National Security against the Constitution. Well Tik Tok's going to have one problem and that is you can't assert constitutional rights on behalf of someone else. That has to be the actual party. They can't come in and say well they can come in and say it that users' free speech is being violated but it's not. They don't have a stake in

that race right. It has to come from users. On the other hand, foreign companies do get some constitutional protections, but it's a huge question as to how far the court will go, any court in the US. Because there are US companies that have been afforded a lot of protections under the Constitution, but a foreign company is a whole another ball of whack. So, a lot of novel issues here. The DOJ, for its part, has said, Well, this is not really a ban. This is just a requirement to change owners, and that users would still have the right to use the platform as they did in the past once it's under US ownership. There's a lot of talk that this could go all the way to the Supreme Court. Could this be sueded all by the presidential election? Yeah, absolutely. That was something I wanted to mention. All right, so a couple of points within that is that, um, first, I think she also did not really talk about the reason all this took place, and that is the threat to national security.

that is still going to be the case, be the case, and I think this will probably end up falling back more and more on that issue, whether it's freedom of speech and those kind of scenarios at play. Within the court of public opinion, it's still questionable. So, the real question is, how does the current presidential race affect this? Is it going to change anything if we have one candidate in or another? There's a clip here that kind of breaks this down. Take a look. That could potentially ban TikTok. Well, let me be clear. We do not want to ban TikTok, and that is not our intention at all. We're not trying to ban TikTok. We're basically saying we got to pay attention to who the owner of TikTok is and pay attention to what that presents in terms of national security issues. We do not want to ban TikTok at all. After trying to ban or sell the app, as President Trump is now saying he would never do that. And you'll never ban TikTok, that's for sure. I will never ban Donald Trump.

was negative on Bitcoin and crypto, tweeted about it as president. Now, all of a sudden, he's positive about it. I don't understand how he gets a free pass. All right, so a few things with the Trump side. It's more of a scenario where he's learning about these kinds of platforms. On the Harris side, I think they're more of a position, Hey, we don't want to restrict business, but at the same time, we're not going to risk national security. I think at the end, this is how it's going to go. It will go to a divestiture. I think the question mark is how much of that tech would transition with that new owner and what it might look like. TikTok might be a completely different kind of app, but TikTok has its 15 minutes to fight for its life. The point is, they've got three judges that are involved here, and you've got an Obama appointee, a Trump appointee, and even all the way back to a Reagan appointee with Ginsburg. So, the

point being is this is very bipartisan. I'm going to play a clip here, and this is an audio clip that came in from the hearing today as we recorded this, and I want you to listen to what the judges had to say. Listen to it. So can I ask this question then? If under your rationale, suppose the United States is at war with the country, and then there's a question about whether that foreign country can own a major media source in the US while the war is going on. Is your submission that Congress can't bar the enemy's ownership of a major media source in the US? I think we would still be in the world of strict scrutiny. Maybe that would be a sufficient justification. The government's solution to foreign propaganda in every other context has been disclosure. It has not been a ban. Again, we're looking at a statute. Is your argument though then that if the government is concerned about covert influence by a foreign adversary, it has to disclosure is always the least restrictive means? I mean, that would seem

to me quite a remarkable determination to make certainly for this it do work sure. I mean if the concern is data protection and covert influence by foreign adversary H. How would disclosure be uh some kind in order to apply what you just said. They have to look at what's coming down from Beijing and decide whether it comports with the AC. What's acceptable in the US. Well some of what they do is just done in the US. It it it's true that the source code but but I I so the curation is not entirely in the United States. Well I I guess a couple of answers to that um first of all okay well all right so the judges were peppering the attorney there for Tik Tok. And I think the attorney there was in a very defense position and probably is going from the looks of it. They're probably going to lose this case. Now it doesn't mean that they're going to get banned. I think this is just going to force the sale of the US side of Tik Tok.

and I think that will be a big asset. It's a big asset for ByteDance that will enhance the use and possibly the involvement of how ByteDance looks at TikTok going forward. But if this does end up over onto a blockchain like TikTok or, excuse me, like Polkadot, the opportunity is going to be pretty significant here. If you look at Poly Market, this is TikTok banned in the US, unlikely. I do think, and I would agree with this betting pool right now, is that they are not going to get banned. But if you look at, and I mean, they're going to get sold. If you look at just where, and I want to kind of jump over because there are some scenarios that are similar to this. This is Toncoin. Let me kind of jump into that one right there. That's Telegram right there, number nine on the top 10 tokens currently in terms of market cap, even after the arrest of their CEO. And if you look at what happened with the rest of their CEO, and I'll show

you some stuff here in a second, but I want to go to a clip real quick that kind of explains what this might mean for a project like a polka dot or others that will get the benefit of a web3 social platform. Take a look, but I would say that the upshot on this, of course, is that to the extent that there's a bright side to this, is that the attention on to on Telegram has never been greater. I wouldn't at all be surprised that the user base of Telegram is going to grow even faster as a result of this because now people are saying, Hey, wait a second, actually, what is this platform that is sort of Freedom-loving for people in America? For instance, most of them don't use Telegram, they don't even know that. I mean, they've heard of it, but they don't even know how big it really is because it's very much a WhatsApp society. And so now the question comes, Wait a second, are other platforms just willingly giving up information like why?

is why isn't why isn't you know Zuckerberg or why isn't someone else basically being arrested for this stuff. Wait, are they actually cooperating with this type of like, like, where's the boundaries between what's okay and what's not okay, bringing it up into people's uh sort of Minds uh and sort of Mind share and and perspective there. Now what yatu, that's the CEO of Anoka Brands, uh a big proponent of web 3 and social decentralization. And if you think about what he's talking about in in essence of uh telegram being more of a free space, obviously with Pavo being arrested, the idea of this being the only platform that is somewhat not uh maybe not as seen as an Overlook by the US government. I think that's the question. And when you look at just the amount of ADD Ares that have come up on the ton uh platform, I mean this has continued to explode. So the likelihood is the awareness is starting to get out there in the Western countries is like what.

yatsu was talking to is there's a lot of people that just don't use Telegram. It's not a well-known platform, but I think it may become that. Now, remember though, it is still not a decentralized social media platform. It's just that it has a different architecture in terms of the management and the creation of how it's done. That's where I think if TikTok does flip over to a web 3 platform and Polkadots involved, that changes the dynamic pretty quickly. If you take a look at some of the stats on Toncoin, this is Ton scan right here, and you look at the growth, you can kind of see massive growth right here. The likelihood, first of all, this is not a public, not just anyone can go out and build up on it. So how does this frame up in comparison to maybe a true web 3 open system that would be decentralized? I think that's going to be the question going forward. Telegram could continue to accelerate in terms of interest, popularity, etc., and I think the narrative

that is starting to get behind this is that it's a very private blockchain, or excuse me, very private platform, and that may be enough to really continue its growth and opportunity, especially with what we've seen going on with TikTok. If you think about this as a decentralized platform, what other things could be exposed or potentially connected to it from a web 3 platform? One of them is going to be music, and the one platform out there is going to be that I think would probably flow into this would be Audius. Audius TikTok integration already, so you can already do your tracks directly on Audius from TikTok. That was a big part, and remember that they also are one of the only ones that have been able to go out there and get licensing agreements with the US performing rights organization. So that would open them up immediately to potentially be maybe partnered with something like a Polkadot-driven and TikTok. So lots of things here happening in the crypto space, definitely from a web 3 standpoint, and the real focus here.

is the potential for a decentralized social media. Whether TikTok is that target or not, the likelihood of seeing this happen faster, I think, is becoming a reality and coming very soon. All right, if you guys are not part of the Diamond Circle mixture and jump in right now, it's another place where we do additional content. We do the market update there. You can only get that over there, of course, if you are dialed into the Diamond Circle. So just click the link down below. And of course, if you're not following me out there on X, do that. It's just Paul Baron. We'll catch you next time right here on Tech Bath. [Music]

Tik Tok Moving To Polkadot!?🚨Web3 Court Battle Begins!🚀

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TikTok's Potential Shift to the Cryptosphere

TikTok's parent company is facing a court hearing that could lead to a ban or sale of the app in the U.

Frank McCourt from Project Liberty is a potential buyer, aiming to create a decentralized social media platform and offering users control over their data.

The project is backed by institutions with trillions of dollars and has already gained over a million users on its alternative internet platform.

The Potential of Decentralized Social Media

The team tested 30 different blockchains and chose Polkadot's architecture for implementing DSNP, aiming to supercharge Web 3 social media.

The transition of platforms like Miwe from Web 2 to Web 3 is already happening, indicating a shift towards decentralized social media.

This movement could challenge the existing power dynamics of major social media platforms and pave the way for a true decentralized web.

Project Liberty is backed by trillion-dollar asset managers, highlighting the economic impact of TikTok's potential downfall in the U.

The Justice Department's court case against TikTok could force a divestment to a U.

owner or lead to a ban, with the company arguing that this violates constitutional rights.

The case raises novel legal questions about the constitutional protections for foreign companies and could potentially reach the Supreme Court, with the presidential election adding another layer of uncertainty.

Trump's Changing Stance on Crypto and TikTok's Legal Battle

Trump's shift from being negative to positive about Bitcoin and crypto has raised questions about his consistency.

The Biden administration, represented by Harris, aims to balance business interests with national security concerns regarding foreign ownership of companies like TikTok.

The ongoing legal battle for TikTok involves bipartisan judges, and the outcome may lead to the divestiture of its US operations rather than a complete ban.

ByteDance's involvement with TikTok is expected to enhance its use and engagement, with a potential shift to a blockchain like Polkadot.

The betting pool suggests that TikTok is unlikely to be banned in the US, but a sale is anticipated.

Telegram's CEO's arrest has increased the platform's attention, potentially driving user growth and raising questions about data privacy and social platform cooperation.

Telegram's unique architecture may drive its growth and popularity, despite not being a decentralized platform.

The potential integration of TikTok with a Web 3.

0 system, particularly through Polkadot, could change the dynamic of social media.

Audius, with its TikTok integration and licensing agreements, may play a key role in the decentralized social media landscape.