Jack Dorsey’s ditched Twitter for bitcoin. Has the social media bubble burst? | Richard Seymour

With major platforms struggling to make a profit, Dorsey is following the money. Cryptocurrency may be about to go mainstream

Jack Dorsey is resigning from Twitter to spend more time with his other company, Square. In some ways, the choice between Twitter and Square is a straight choice between political clout and profit. Square, a payments platform co-founded by Dorsey in 2009, is worth almost three times Twitter's current value at about $97bn (73bn). But Square will never be credited with the equivalent of the Twitter revolution", or make headlines by banning a former president.

Venture capital is pouring money into cryptocurrencies and payment platforms. Twitter, by contrast, having only started to become profitable since 2018, has always been more notable for its political impact than its commercial pull. However, Twitter, like the wider social industry of which it is a part, may be experiencing the limits of its growth. In terms of commercial reach, Twitter is no competition for industry giants such as Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram and TikTok, which each have well over a billion users. But even Facebook and Instagram are slowing down.