Bluesky, the decentralized social app, announced on Thursday that it had raised a $15 million Series A round. This comes on the heels of its $8 million seed raise last year. The funding comes as Bluesky continues to experience increased growth, in part from X users who are troubled by recent changes to the block feature and the move to allow third parties to train AI on users' public posts. Over the past month, Bluesky has added around 3 million new users, bringing the number of its users up to around 13 million.

Bluesky was incubated inside Twitter as then-CEO Jack Dorsey's vision of what social media should be like in the future. But the social network and developer of the open source AT Protocol is no longer tied to Dorsey, who left the startup's board earlier this year. However, many of the original objectives of Bluesky still stand: just like Mastodon's AT Protocol is decentralized, so that individuals can easily set up their own social servers and apps, and meanwhile allow people outside of the company to have transparency on how and what is being developed.

"With this fundraise, we'll continue to support and grow Bluesky's community, invest in Trust and Safety and further support the ATmosphere developer ecosystem," the blog announcement on Bluesky reads. "As a supplement, we'll begin building a subscription model for features like higher quality video uploads or profile customizations like colors and avatar frames."

But the Bluesky team has been quick to tell users that this paid tier will not be like X, where subscribers get their blue check marks and their old algorithmic upranking and make posts more visible.

The way Twitter did subscriptions was basically a blueprint for how Bluesky shouldn't do them," Bluesky developer Paul Frazee tweeted. Pay-to-win features in getting visibility or having a blue check because you're a subscriber is just wrong and ruins the network for everybody.

Led by Blockchain Capital and including Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, SevenX, Darkmode's Amir Shevat, and co-creator of Kubernetes Joe Beda, there's a crypto-focused firm among them that might raise red flags among critics; after all, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber used to be a software engineer at Zcash, another crypto company, but the company has pre-emptively calmed users saying it's definitely not pivoting to web3.

Our lead investor, Blockchain Capital, shares our vision that technology should be a tool for the user, not vice versa — the chosen technology should never be in direct exchange with the user experience," Bluesky said in its announcement. "That does not mean, of course that we won't hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.) because the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency.

Additionally, Graber announced that General Partner with Blockchain Capital, Kinjal Shah, is joining Bluesky's board of directors.

"Shares our vision for a social media ecosystem that empowers users and supports developer freedom, and it's been a great experience working with her. With her support, we are well-positioned to grow," Graber wrote.