Twitter's New CEO Parag Agrawal: Good for Bitcoin?

What has Parag Agrawal, Jack Dorsey's replacement as Twitter CEO, said about cryptocurrency?

By Jeff Benson

In brief

• Jack Dorsey, a Bitcoin proponent, has stepped down as CEO of Twitter.
• CTO Parag Agrawal is taking over as CEO after overseeing Twitter's Web 3 projects.

In a surprise move, Jack Dorsey today stepped down as Twitter CEO, giving way to Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal.

According to a press release, Agrawal, who has been with the company since 2011, has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and was the company's "first Distinguished Engineer due to his work across revenue and consumer engineering."

But what we really want to know is: What does his appointment mean for Twitter's involvement in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency more broadly?

Dorsey is a well-known proponent of Bitcoin who has publicly dismissed altcoins. Moreover, Dorsey's other company, payments firm Square, only allows one cryptocurrency for purchase on its Cash App: Bitcoin. And earlier this month, its uber-secretive TBD division released a white paper detailing a decentralized exchange for Bitcoin without so much as mentioning Ethereum, upon which the bulk of DEXes are built. "All of the other coins, for me, don't factor in at all," he said of Square's crypto plans.

Now, Agrawal is stepping into Dorsey's shoes (or meditation slippers) to lead a social media company that has dipped its toes into the crypto waters—with Agrawal doing much of the dipping as point person on Twitter's decentralized social media protocol project, bluesky, and the recently unveiled Twitter Crypto team.  

A person with knowledge of the executive (but who declined to be named because they weren't authorized to speak publicly) told Decrypt, "Parag has been integral to Bluesky (the decentralized protocol project), so safe to say he's a crypto believer. And even if he weren't, Twitter needs audience and engagement growth, and crypto is a super-vital community to that."

Whereas Dorsey has been a public figure for the better part of a decade, Agrawal has made few public comments about anything, let alone cryptocurrency. The executive has only one tweet mentioning BTC: a November 2019 post about a Bitcoin meetup in Nigeria which used a fire emoji to convey the importance of the cryptocurrency to the African country. In fact, the social media company CTO, made just 10 tweets and 13 retweets in all of 2021, an average of one post every two weeks—and most of them didn't touch upon crypto.