Billionaire Frank McCourt: ‘Dodgy Cryptocurrencies and Silly NFTs’ Shatter the Blockchain Narrative

Billionaire real estate developer Frank McCourt has taken it upon himself to disrupt the narrative surrounding blockchain.

Speaking at Web Summit 2023, McCourt said his own project, DSNP, an open Internet protocol, is not covered by tokenization. “Dodgy cryptocurrencies and sly NFTs are not the same as the core technology that will make the Internet better for us,” he said, adding that “the narrative is somewhat distorted.”

Blockchain has the potential to “fix the internet”. “And by fix, I mean identity, provenance, verifiable attributes, proofs. That's what blockchain does so well: immutable reality, incorruptible data.”

DSNP, or Decentralized Social Networking Protocol, uses Frequency, a layer-1 parachain on SpottedFor “a basic implementation of social graph and public messaging” – though he takes pains to note that his social graph is “not connected to crypto tokens or private company database servers with any monetary incentives”.

McCourt and Project Independence

In the year McCourt, who is stepping down as CEO of real estate firm McCourt Global to focus on the nonprofit Project Freedom in 2022, unveiled his “Better Web” manifesto at Web Summit.

In the manifesto, he argued that large tech and social media platforms had caused “tremendous damage” to society by “creating an engine of techno-capital to chase, twist and captivate people”. He added that AI could act as a “powerful accelerator” of these negative trends, calling on internet users to “seize your data and take back your digital rights”.

“Project Freedom is pro-technology,” McCourt said at the forum. But it's not a supportive, centralized monitoring technology.

He added that DSNP has transitioned more than 170,000 users of Web2's social media platform MeWe to the protocol, and the number is expected to reach 300,000 by the end of the year and over one million by the end of Q1 2024.

McCourt argued, “If the new apps click on our terms of use instead of clicking on the terms of use set by the big five platforms, how is our data being used?”