UPDATED 13:38 EDT / JULY 16 2021

BLOCKCHAIN

Square is making a decentralized finance platform based on bitcoin called ‘TBD’

Digital payments company Square Inc. has announced plans to launch an open-source, bitcoin-focused decentralized financial services project that will be named “TBD.”

Square’s Chief Executive Jack Dorsey took to Twitter in a series of tweets late Thursday to outline the plans. He said the company would be “focused on building an open developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services.”

Decentralized finance or DeFi applications are services that don’t rely on centralized services such as banks and use software smart contracts based on blockchain technology to execute transactions between buyers and sellers.

Square allows users to pay one another with money transfers using its mobile phone app as well as offers a point-of-sale platform for merchants. The company began allowing users to buy and sell bitcoin on its platform in January 2018 through its payment app and integration with its Cash App investment app.

During the past month, Dorsey recently confirmed the development of a bitcoin hardware wallet for merchants in order to increase security. That would give them a safer way to store the cryptocurrency at point-of-sale.

“Like our new Bitcoin hardware wallet, we’re going to do this completely in the open,” Dorsey said in a follow-up tweet. “Open roadmap, open development, and open source. [Mike Brock] is leading and building this team, and we have some ideas around the initial platform primitives we want to build.”

Mike Brock is the leader of strategic development at Square and will be heading up the TBD team. “On a personal note, I just want to say that I am super excited to return to the world of open-source,” Brock tweeted. “I cut my professional teeth in open source at [Red Hat] and excited to prove to the world (again) that great businesses can be built atop of free and open software.”

Dorsey added that although Square already has a division called Square Crypto, which is dedicated to general bitcoin and cryptocurrency-related projects, it differs from TBD. Square Crypto does not receive direction from Dorsey, only funding. That funding goes out to grants and projects. TBD will remain focused on creating a platform for DeFi business and remain open source along the way.

Dorsey said he would make a GitHub and Twitter account for the new business and has already made good on the Twitter account.

Image: Bitcoin

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