Square Releases White Paper Detailing Protocol for a Decentralized Bitcoin Exchange

Payments giant Square released a white paper on Friday detailing a new decentralized protocol for exchanging digital and other assets known as tbDEX.

“The tbDEX protocol facilitates decentralized networks of exchange between assets by providing a framework for establishing social trust, utilizing decentralized identity (DID) and verifiable credentials (VCs) to establish the provenance of identity in the real world,” the company wrote in the paper’s abstract.
In a post introducing the protocol, a TBD developer wrote that “the tbDEX protocol aims to create ubiquitous and accessible on-ramps and off-ramps that allow the average individual to benefit from crypto innovation.”
TBD has published the white paper in GitHub so that the community can contribute.
Square CEO Jack Dorsey, who’s also the CEO of Twitter, announced the company’s plan to create an open developer platform for a decentralized bitcoin exchange back in August. He noted that TBD, Square’s new division focused on developing non-custodial and decentralized financial services, would be building the exchange.
Mike Brock, who heads strategic development at Square, is leading the new project. Brock has previously tweeted 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.”

UPDATE (Nov. 19, 21:56 UTC): Adds info on GitHub in third bullet point.

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