Jack Dorsey Announces ‘TBD’ – A New DeFi Initiative Focused on Bitcoin

In the past, Twitter and Square CEO, Jack Dorsey, has gone on record stating that if he weren’t needed at Twitter, he would be fully devoting his time towards the development of Bitcoin related solutions.

“Bitcoin changes absolutely everything.  I don’t think there is anything more important in my lifetime to work on…if I were not at Square or Twitter, I would be working on bitcoin.”

While he remains a prominent fixture at each company, Dorsey has recently announced multiple new initiatives that will combine his passions as Square looks to develop not only a hardware Bitcoin wallet, but an open-developer platform currently titled ‘TBD’.

Dorsey Announces ‘TBD'

Whether the name of this project is to-be-determined, or another acronym including Bitcoin is not clear.  What is clear is its purpose – ‘making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services’ with a primary focus on Bitcoin.

The founding team behind this project includes the following individuals.

• Rebecca Corcillo
• Emily Chiu
• Hetong Li
• Kanishk Parashar
• Mike Brock

Dorsey states that TBD will take shape as a ‘platform business’, and that its development and roadmap will be open in nature.  While specific goals of the business have not yet been outlined, Dorsey indicates that a variety of promising ideas are already in the works.

It would appear as though the Lightning Network is not on its list of ideas, as Square Crypto (a company funded by Square itself) is already hard at work on the Lightning Development Kit (LDK).  Time will tell where this leaves TBD, and the problems it intends on tackling.

Hardware Wallet

If news of the aforementioned project wasn’t promising enough, Square also recently announced that it is actively developing a new hardware wallet for Bitcoin.

In order to facilitate the mainstream acceptance of Bitcoin, secure and easy to use solutions are needed surrounding custody.  Hardware wallets, while secure, are often forced to sacrifice ease-of-use to achieve this.  As a result, while they may seem easy to use for the crypto-savvy, hardware wallets can indeed be daunting to the uninitiated.

The goal of Square’s wallet it to provide an ‘assisted self-custody’ experience.  Meaning users will remain in full control of their private keys, but benefit from streamlined setup processes.  As development is still in its early stages, few details have been provided so far on how Square intends to achieve this.

The B Word

While each of the aforementioned initiatives have been announced by Dorsey via Twitter, it would be reasonable to expect more details to be divulged at an upcoming Bitcoin conference known as ‘The B Word’.

This event is particularly anticipated, as it will see Dorsey engage in a discussion on Bitcoin with none other than Elon Musk.

The B Word is scheduled to take place on July 21^st, and is focused on ‘demystifying’ and ‘destigmatizing’ various narratives associated with Bitcoin.