With $20 Billion TikTok Bid, Project Liberty Wants to Port 170 Million Users Onchain

Can a decentralized TikTok become the first killer app of Web3?

Project Liberty thinks the answer is yes, and they’re bidding for the right to buy the embattled social media network and prove it.

Founded by McCourt Global executive chairman Frank McCourt, Project Liberty is the leader of a consortium that includes Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary. Together they’ve put together The People’s Bid for TikTok, an attempt to port all 170 million U.S. TikTok users onto a new blockchain-based social network that would give creators full control of their content.

“What would it take to decentralize TikTok,” asks Sheila Warren, COO of Project Liberty and CEO of the Project Liberty Institute, which aim to build a more decentralized internet.

“Well, it would take proving the concept that you actually can migrate users from a social media platform onto a decentralized stack and that they will stay,” she said in an interview. “And we've done that. We've actually done it at small scale, a couple of million users, but we've done it” with privacy and user-control-focused social networking platform MeWe, which has 1.67 million users.

A better way

This involves transferring users and content creators onto Project Liberty’s Frequency network, a blockchain built to support decentralized social networks that give people control over their online presence.

“We talk about allowing users to have voice, choice, and stake in the internet,” said Warren, the former head of data, blockchain and digital assets for the World Economic Forum and CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation.

Warren argues that this takes two different forms. The first is integrating with an existing social media platform and giving users a greater economic stake and more freedom, which has been tried with mixed results.

“I would argue a better answer is to actually look at the tech stack,” Warren said. “If the initiation of the technology itself at the most base layer actually enables freedom of movement, on and off applications, then you have the ultimate freedom, because you could make a real, meaningful choice.”

The inability to leave a current social media platform with your identity and the assets you’ve created “means you're kind of stuck, and you're beholden to the whims of whatever the decision makers decide,” she said. “In our space the whole point is you have peer-to-peer engagement, you have freedom of movement, you can do all of that.”

ByteDance is selling TikTok after Congress voted to shut the platform down due to national security concerns about the Chinese-owned social media site. Scheduled to be banned on Jan. 19, it got a 75-day reprieve when President Donald Trump, a fan who used it during his recent presidential campaign, pledged to save it.

President Trump said last week that four groups are in discussions to buy the site, although Warren said Project Liberty’s was the only one with a formal bid. The bid is $20 billion, according to the New York Post.

A moonshot project

McCourt, Ohanian and O’Leary all understand that the current system is broken, Warren said. But they also know that Project Liberty’s bid “is a moonshot,” she added.

“But if this is successful, we're going to prove that web3 scales,” Warren said.

A successfully decentralized TikTok would also unlock data sharing models, economic models and other ways of giving users an ecosystem in which they have more freedom and flexibility.

“It's not to say that you have to suddenly become some super degen enterprise,” Warren said. “You can run a business that's familiar to a social media platform provider, but you can do that in a way that makes sure that you are motivating and incentivizing your users and your creators to stay on your platform.”

Of course, the flip side of a social media project is the advertising that makes it run. Warren said Project Liberty went to advertisers to ask what they thought of the idea of a decentralized TikTok, if they found it threatening.

“They love it, they’re very excited about it,” Warren said. “Frank talks a lot about moving away from the attention economy to the intention economy. And what advertisers and brands want is people that want to be there, that want their content, that are primed to purchase.”

What’s next?

Jumping over to what would happen once TikTok is purchased, Warren said the best, most instructive example is what Project Liberty has already done with MeWe and some smaller projects and Project Liberty’s Frequency network.

Frequency network is a Layer 1 blockchain built upon the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), an application-agnostic open protocol designed to give users control of their social relationships and data.

Created by Project Liberty and stewarded by the Project Liberty Institute, the DSNP lets people move their social graph across platforms fluidly and without losing their data, content or relationships.

Frequency aims to ensure that users have cryptographic protection for their personal data, and that they can migrate with it across the ecosystem, taking their data with them. It has a token, FRQC, that hasn’t launched publicly yet.

MeWe is a privacy-focused social media network with 20 million users, about two million of whom have been migrated onto Frequency, a Polkadot parachain.

What would it look like?

As for the actual migration, the only certain part is that it would happen in stages, Warren said. Maybe that means starting with smaller users, or maybe smaller users and huge users, bringing the big influencers over to show that you can do it and make it sticky.

“I think that if you’re a casual user, it would look very similar to you,” she said. People who just go on to scroll would find that the idea is not to change the experience but to keep it stable. It’s the functionality that would be different.

What do creators want?

“We've gone to the top creators on Tiktok specifically, but also across other platforms, to ask what would be interesting to you? And to a person they say, ‘We don't like the models that are there currently. We want to have more ability to share more easily with our followers. We'd like to give them economic incentives more easily.’”

While that’s possible in some existing models and more complicated in others, she said, what content creators say is they want to make more choices and have more discretion in how they engage their communities and how they incentivize them. Right now, they can’t do that.

[UPDATE: Story corrected to reflect Sheila Warren's title is COO of Project Liberty]