Jack Dorsey and Mike Brock say Square's TBD is building a Bitcoin-centric decentralized exchange for digital assets
Square's Cash App is a popular way for people to buy and sell Bitcoin, but CEO Jack Dorsey's love for the leading cryptocurrency is immense—and the financial services firm plans to do a lot more in the space.
TBD’s planned decentralized exchange gives that developer-focused effort a concrete market-infrastructure project, moving Square’s Bitcoin work beyond consumer buying and selling.
First-order effects
TBD and Mike Brock are tasked with building a Bitcoin-centric decentralized exchange, making exchange infrastructure a defined part of Square’s Bitcoin strategy.
Square’s Bitcoin operations now span Cash App trading, open-source contributions, and a planned developer-facing exchange effort.
Second-order effects
Developers targeted by Square’s new business line gain a prospective Bitcoin-focused exchange layer to build around, rather than only Square’s existing consumer trading channel.
Square must reconcile the distinct roles of Cash App’s retail Bitcoin access and TBD’s decentralized-exchange initiative as its crypto activities broaden.
Third-order effects
If Square continues connecting consumer access, open-source work, developer tools, and exchange infrastructure, its Bitcoin strategy shifts toward owning more layers of the ecosystem rather than a single trading feature.
The trend: Square is extending its Bitcoin strategy from retail access into the developer and infrastructure layers of decentralized finance.
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.
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.
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.
Jack Dorsey and the Square team focused on bitcoin just announced they are going to build a decentralized bitcoin exchange. We are just getting started as decentralization eats the world.
Why does it have to be Bitcoin centric? WTF is wrong with these people and their need to go all in on the first iteration of a new technology https://twitter.com/...
#Bitcoin trying to build a decentralized exchange now. Good effort, but this also shows how far ahead defi-tokens like Million is, already tradeable on two decentralized exchanges (#Uniswap and #PancakeSwap). https://twitter.com/...