On Friday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that TBD, a subsidiary of Dorsey’s payments firm Square that focuses on developing an open developer platform, is working on a decentralized Bitcoin exchange.
“We’ve determined TBD’s direction: help us build an open platform to create a decentralised exchange for bitcoin,” Dorsey tweeted.
Mike Brock, Square’s general manager of TBD, who was selected to lead the program, said in a subsequent tweet that “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[d] exchange for fiat.”
Mr Brock went on to describe the big challenges he sees with existing crypto exchanges and custodial services such as Coinbase and Cash App.
Platforms like these are centralized, and users in many nations throughout the world are subject to restrictions and regulations.
Brock noted “gaps around cost and scalability,” and that TBD needed “a solve for exchange infrastructure between digital assets, like stablecoins.”