Jack Dorsey: ‘TBD’ Will Be Open Platform for Decentralized Bitcoin Exchanges

Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey said that Square’s new business, TBD, will be created to help “build an open platform to create a decentralized exchange for bitcoin,” he wrote in a tweet Friday. 

The concept for TBD, which is held under the twitter handle TBD54566975, was “born” on July 15, as a new business for the digital payments service company Square, Dorsey previously announced. 

“Square is creating a new business (joining Seller, Cash App, & Tidal) focused on building an open developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services. Our primary focus is #Bitcoin. Its name is TBD,” Dorsey tweeted in July. 

Mike Brock, the TBD lead at Square, said in a tweet Friday that there has been a lot of speculation about what TBD is and isn’t, but shared a handful of details about what direction the company will be going in. 

“We believe Bitcoin will be the native currency of the internet. While there are many projects to help make the internet more decentralized, our focus is solely on a sound global monetary system for all. But including all requires a few pieces we think are missing,” Brock said.

Brock added that getting bitcoin typically involves exchanging fiat at a centralized custodial service like CashApp or Coinbase, but there are a number of issues at these on-and-off ramps. 

“This is the problem we’re going to solve: make it easy to fund a non-custodial wallet anywhere in the world through a platform to build on- and off-ramps into Bitcoin. You can think about this as a decentralize exchange for fiat,” Brock said. 

The platform will be developed in the public and open-sourced and open-protocol for any crypto wallet to use it, he said. “Permissionless or bust,” Brock added. 

While the company now moves in this direction, there are still “gaps” ahead with regards to cost and scalability as well as the ability to create an exchange infrastructure between digital assets, like stablecoins, Brock said. 

Dorsey has been a vocal supporter of bitcoin and digital assets in the past. In late July, Dorsey said that bitcoin would become a big part of Twitter’s future and labeled the cryptocurrency as one of the three major trends most relevant to the company, Blockworks previously reported.  

Additionally, Dorsey confirmed in early July that Square was moving forward with plans to build a hardware wallet for bitcoin after hinting about the possibility in early June. The decision was announced in a tweet by Jesse Dorogusker, the hardware lead and TIDAL lead at Square. 

Similar to the announcement about TBD’s direction, Dorsey said the wallet would be “entirely in the open” and would be “an inclusive product that brings a non-custodial solution to the global market,” making bitcoin for everyone.

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