Bitcoin: Twitter founder Jack Dorsey reveals plan to make crypto ‘native currency of the internet’ through TBD

‘While there are many projects to help make the internet more decentralised, our focus is solely on a sound global monetary system for all,’ says TBD chief

Jack Dorsey’s TBD startup will focus on building a decentralised cryptocurrency exchange (Getty Images)

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has revealed what he plans to do with his mysterious bitcoin startup TBD.

The venture, which is a unit of Mr Dorsey’s payments firm Square, will develop a decentralised exchange that will democratise access to the cryptocurrency.

“We’ve determined TBD’s direction: help us build an open platform to create a decentralised exchange for bitcoin,” Mr Dorsey tweeted.

Mike Brock, general manager of TBD at Square, provided more details about TBD’s mission in a series of tweets on Friday.

“There’s been a lot of speculation about what TBD is and isn’t,” he wrote.

“We believe bitcoin will be the native currency of the internet. While there are many projects to help make the internet more decentralised, our focus is solely on a sound global monetary system for all.”

Mr Brock went on to explain what he viewed as the biggest issues with existing crypto exchanges and custodial services like Coinbase and Cash App.

Platforms like these are centralised and are the subject to restrictions and regulations for users in different countries around the world.

“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,” he continued.

“You can think about this as a decentralised exchange for fiat.”

In order for bitcoin to reach its potential as a universal peer-to-peer electronic cash system – as first laid out in Satoshi Nakamoto’s whitepaper – scaling issues need to be resolved.

Slow and expensive transactions have been solved through “layer 2” protocols built on top of bitcoin’s underlying blockchain, however it needs to be rolled out on a massive scale in order for the cryptocurrency to achieve mass adoption as a form of payment.

There is yet to be a popular bitcoin exchange that is decentralised that solves the other issues relating to acquiring and exchanging bitcoin.

“This platform will be entirely developed in public, open-source, open-protocol, and any wallet will be able to use,” Mr Brock concluded.

“No foundation or governance model that TBD controls. Permissionless or bust. We’d love for this to be bitcoin-native, top to bottom.”