- TBD, a division recently created by Square’s Jack Dorsey, is planning to build an entirely decentralized Bitcoin exchange
- TBD lead Mike Brock outlines the plans in a tweet thread that criticized the need for centralized entities in fiat purchases of bitcoin
- TBD aims to decentralize the entire process, which won’t please regulators
Jack Dorsey’s new side project, currently called TBD, will build a decentralized Bitcoin exchange which will solve a “number of problems” with the existing ways in which decentralized exchanges operate. According to TBD project lead Mike Brock, the platform is aiming for a “permissionless or bust” approach, including on and off ramps into fiat. This will be of concern to regulatory bodies who are trying their best to clamp down on cryptocurrency exchanges that don’t implement AML/KYC.
There’s been a lot of speculation about what TBD is and isn’t. Over the last few weeks our team has been determining what needs to be determined. We wanted to finally share our direction, and we have some questions.
— Mike Brock (@brockm) August 27, 2021
TBD Will “Solve Problems” of Current On/off Ramps
In a series of tweets outlining the plans for TBD, Brock outlined what he perceived to be the problems with the methods currently used to buy bitcoin with fiat, saying that centralized services such as Coinbase or Square’s Cash App were the only ways to do so. These services “have a number of issues” according to Brock, and “aren’t distributed evenly around the world.” This, says Brock is where TBD will come in:
(TBS will) 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 (sic) exchange for fiat.
According to Brock the TBD exchange will be “entirely developed in public, open-source, open-protocol, and any wallet will be able to use (it)”. Brock notes that while the Lightning Network will help to scale payments, other areas of the exchange may be harder to build and scale to the requisite level.
Regulators Will be Sharpening Their Knives
Scaling should be the least of Brock’s concerns for TBD however, with regulators from all over the world choosing 2021 to be the year they massively clamped down on unregulated cryptocurrency exchanges. This has forced some, like Binance, to put in stricter controls over users and their account access, so quite how an entirely decentralized exchange like TBD will go down in the current climate does not take a whole lot of guesswork.
