In brief:
- Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey and Jay Z have set aside 500 BTC to fund Bitcoin development
- The funds will be in an endowment trust named ₿trust
- The fund’s focus will be on development teams in Africa and India
- Dorsey and Jay Z will provide ‘zero direction’ and will need 3 additional board members
- Twitter could soon add Bitcoin to its balance sheet
The CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, has just announced that he and Jay Z have set aside 500 BTC to fund Bitcoin development. The funds with a current approximate value of $24 million, will be in an endowment trust aptly named ₿trust. Furthermore, the trust will be geared towards funding Bitcoin development teams in Africa and India.
Mr. Dorsey also explained that the trust will be ‘a blind irrevocable trust’ whereby neither he nor Jay Z, will provide input as to its direction. The trust currently needs three additional board members.
Jack Dorsey made the announcement of the Bitcoin trust via the following tweet that also includes a link for an application to become a board member of ₿trust.
JAY-Z/@S_C_ and I are giving 500 BTC to a new endowment named ₿trust to fund #Bitcoin development, initially focused on teams in Africa & India. It‘ll be set up as a blind irrevocable trust, taking zero direction from us. We need 3 board members to start: https://t.co/L4mRBryMJe
— jack (@jack) February 12, 2021
Twitter Could Be the Next Company to Add Bitcoin to Its Balance Sheet
News of Jack Dorsey and Jay Z setting up a Bitcoin trust geared towards BTC development comes in the wake of Tesla announcing that it had added $1.5 Billion in BTC to its balance sheet. As soon as the Tesla news hit, speculation started growing as to which major company would be next to purchase Bitcoin as part of its treasury.
In a recent interview with CNBC, the CFO of Twitter, Ned Segal, explained that the company was looking into the idea of buying Bitcoin as Tesla did. Mr. Segal had this to say.
We watch closely what other companies do to see what we can learn from them and when we think about our balance sheet, we think about matching how it’s invested and the currencies in which it is invested relative to how we might pay people. Whether it’s paying somebody who has provided a service to us or paying an employee.
So we have done a lot of upfront thinking to consider how we might pay employees…should they ask to be paid in Bitcoin…how we might pay a vendor if they ask to be paid in Bitcoin…and whether we need to have Bitcoin on our balance sheet should that happen.
