Earlier today, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced a partnership with hip-hop mogul and billionaire Sean Carter, aka Jay-Z, to create a Bitcoin development endowment focused initially on teams in India and Africa.
The endowment will be called the “₿trust” and the pair will be bootstrapping it with 500 bitcoin, currently valued at more than $23 million. ₿trust is currently recruiting three board members, which Dorsey is soliciting through the relatively informal platform Google Forms.
The board member application has a simple message at the top: “mission: make bitcoin the internet’s currency.” It can be filled pseudonymously and it asks candidates to simply submit a freeform written description of their credentials, under a field titled “proof of work.”
While details still remain scarce, one important factor to note at this point is that the endowment is being set up as a blind, irrevocable trust. In other words, Dorsey and Carter will have no say in how the endowment operates.
The fact that this investment is focused partially on Africa should not come as a surprise, as Dorsey has visited the continent several times, even making public plans to move to Africa in 2020, before the world was brought to a halt by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dorsey’s digital payments company, Square, has also worked to fuel Bitcoin development with grants through its cryptocurrency-focused division, Square Crypto.