Jay Graber to Helm Twitter’s Bluesky Initiative

Twitter has found the leader for its initiative to create a decentralized social network standard, called Bluesky, as Happening founder Jay Graber revealed she had accepted the role in a tweet on Monday.

Graber has been working with Twitter to develop Bluesky over the past year and in January 2021 she authored a review of the decentralized web ecosystem for the initiative. She announced her next move at the Twitter-funded initiative, which will be set up as an independent entity, will be to hire a small team starting with a protocol developer and a web developer.

In a tweet, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said Graber’s hiring was another step towards decentralizing Twitter and social media and stated, “Now we can move much faster, and through code.”

The social media giant’s tech lead, Parag Agrawal added, “The team and community that Jay will bring together can shape the future of social media through decentralization using open standards.”

Prior to her work on Bluesky, Graber was the creator of social event-planning platform Happening. She also helped develop the Electric Coin Company’s cryptocurrency called Zcash.

In a tweet of her own, Graber said, “I look forward to partnering closely with Twitter and other companies as we embark on this journey. It won’t happen overnight, but we’ll share our progress along the way.”