Jack Dorsey's Square Wants to Build a Decentralized Exchange for Bitcoin

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has also been experimenting in the payments space through his other company, Square. After focusing on making credit card payments easier for a few years, the company deep-dived into cryptocurrency payments and even purchased $170 million worth of Bitcoin earlier this year. Now, in a tweet, Dorsey has announced that Square will make an open-sourced decentralized exchange (DEX) for Bitcoin.

Dorsey is known to be quite fond of Bitcoin. He sees the crypto coin play an important role in the future of his internet company, Twitter, as well as in uniting the world.  Last month, Dorsey also spoke at a Bitcoin conference, talking about the archaic nature of current payment systems and how Bitcoin was the ideal system to replace them. 

There are many cryptocurrency exchanges in the market already. So what sets Dorsey's project apart? Dorsey linked to a thread from Mike Brock, project leader at TBD, most likely a place-holder name of the project, to tell us more about it.

Brock reiterated how the company believes that Bitcoin is the currency of the internet but also lamented how accessing it is problematic at the moment. To gain access to the coin, one needs to use intermediaries such as Coinbase or Square's own, Cash App. However, neither of them has the reach across 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. You can think about this as a decentralize exchange for fiat.

— Mike Brock (@brockm) August 27, 2021

Brock added that TBD plans to build this DEX as an open-source, open-protocol service that works with any wallet in a permissionless way. He also said that he sees the DEX native to Bitcoin and uses smart contracts on it but there are other gap areas too. 

Some of the gaps we currently see are around cost and scalability. Lightning is solving for this with payments. We need a solve for exchange infrastructure between digital assets, like stablecoins.

— Mike Brock (@brockm) August 27, 2021

Brock and Dorsey are reaching out to Bitcoin enthusiasts to determine existing projects that can be solved in a native Bitcoin way. 

As a user replied to Brock's thread, Ethereum, another blockchain technology, solves the problems possessed by native Bitcoin. Dorsey has also experimented with Non-fungible tokens (NFT) that also use blockchain technology. Earlier this year, he sold his first tweet for $2.9 million.  Why is the company being a Bitcoin maximalist, is probably best explained by their previous investments.