TikTok Showcases First Video on Bitcoin as Publisher Sets Up DLT Venture

Popular video sharing application TikTok has been used to telecast a short video on Bitcoin (BTC) by the founder of a blockchain focused startup.

The viral video, posted by the person, identified by TikTok id name ‘The Wolf of Bitcoins’, exhibits a room in a house supposedly equipped with numerous crypto mining hardware systems.

The video shows a simple headline “this is why GPU prices went up,” and includes several Bitcoin related references such as “explain Bitcoin”, “Bitcoin” and “Bitcoin mining.”

The video has already received more than 1.20 million views and over 109,000 likes on the TikTok platform. The video came to highlight after Thomas Schulz, crypto entrepreneur, tweeted about the video on December 14, highlighting it as the “first viral Bitcoin TikTok.”

Schulz explained that he is not the one who created the video, pointing that there was no other instance when TikTok feed showed a video on Bitcoin.

Notably, the holding company of TikTok, ByteDance, has entered into a partnership with state-run Chinese news outlet and ThePaper.cn owner Shanghai Dongfang Newspaper to establish a blockchain based enterprise.

ByteDance, which owns a 49% stake in the venture, rolled out the project with Chinese associate in Shandong province of China. TikTok, the third most downloaded app in the Apple store, has roughly 500 million monthly active users.

The short video feed shown to users is managed by custom built AI tool that monitors user activity and delivers content that has high probability of being watched.

There has been heavy criticism about TikTok’s way of picking videos for showing to users. In this regard, last year, Connie Chan, a venture partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, asserted that TikTok “completely controls what users see” through the use of AI.

Connie Chan explained how TikTok platform works:

“The platform can decide to show videos that are upbeat, funny, and/or wholesome — in fact, the entire vibe of the platform is largely under TikTok’s control because they, not users, decide which videos to display. Even if a user subscribes to a creator, there is no guarantee that he/she will see all of the creator’s videos.”