Frank McCourt, who leads Project Liberty and the blockchain network Frequency, sees TikTok as a perfect fit for a decentralized internet model. He wants to merge TikTok with to give users, not corporations, control over data, algorithms, and privacy.
McCourt believes this will bring the best of blockchain technology to TikTok’s large user base, adding more value for both creators and users.
TikTok, the popular social media platform with over 1.5 billion monthly active users, has been labeled by the U.S. government as a potential Chinese spy tool. This has led to calls for its parent company, ByteDance, to divest its U.S. operations.
With around 150 million U.S.-based users, McCourt has made an unexpected bid to acquire TikTok to merge it with Polkadot.
According to Alpha Airdrop, McCourt’s interest in TikTok aligns with his broader strategy of leveraging blockchain technology to decentralize internet governance.
McCourt’s Project Liberty has already announced plans to bring TikTok onto the blockchain using Polkadot’s infrastructure. This strategy, McCourt believes, could turn TikTok into a test case for blockchain’s capabilities in handling data ownership and privacy issues on a massive scale.
The challenge is huge though, said Alpha Airdrop analyst.
TikTok’s massive data load, with around 34 million videos uploaded daily, is tough for any blockchain to handle, he added. Most blockchains struggle with such heavy data processing, often experiencing slowdowns or outages, even with simpler tasks.
However, McCourt is confident that Polkadot, especially with its upcoming 2.0 upgrades, can manage it. These upgrades are set to boost Polkadot’s scalability, making it capable of running large-scale applications without losing performance.
McCourt’s initiative, dubbed the “People’s Bid,” seeks to integrate TikTok with Frequency, a decentralized protocol already successfully tested on the social media app MeWe, which has over 20 million users.
Polkadot, created by co-founder Gavin Wood, is now a top platform for decentralized applications. Its design allows multiple specialized blockchains to run at the same time, making it more efficient at handling large amounts of data.