Square founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey, has revealed that his company is in the process of building a decentralized financial service using the Bitcoin blockchain technology. He announced that the new Square division will witness the merging of Seller, Cash App, and Tidal and will be based on open source.
According to him, the emerging financial service will be permissionless and non-custodial, as well as fully decentralized. He also tweeted that Square had just launched a new Bitcoin hardware wallet under the leadership of Mike Brock. However, Square’s hardware development is led by Jesse Dorogusker.
“Like our new #Bitcoin hardware wallet, we’re going to do this completely in the open,” Dorsey stated. “Open roadmap, open development, and open source. @brockm is leading and building this team, and we have some ideas around the initial platform primitives we want to build.”
To underscore his passion to see the new platform – which is named TBD – succeed, Dorsey said he would not mind vacating his job temporarily at Square and Twitter, to help develop the new Square financial services to maturity. He also added that both companies have a role to play in helping to make TBD a massive success within a short period of time.
“Bitcoin changes absolutely everything,” said Dorsey. “I don’t think there is anything more important in my life to work on. If I were not at Square or Twitter, I would be working on bitcoin. If [Bitcoin] needed more help than Square or Twitter, I would leave them for bitcoin. But, I believe both companies have a role to play.”
The kind of decentralized finance (DeFi) which Dorsey is trying to build does not rely on banks and conventional financial transactions, but on blockchain technology which sidetracks bank transactions. According to experts, DeFi is cheaper to operate and more accessible to almost anyone, while also yielding higher returns over time.
“DeFi platforms function similarly to traditional banks and financial services companies and could pose a disruption risk in the coming years,” said Needham’s John Todaro. “In the current yield-starved environment, there has been an increased demand for DeFi platforms which offer significantly higher yields than traditional financial products.”
According to Mike Brock, Square’s hardware lead, the company’s financial decentralization is set to take the world by storm and has the potential to unlock lots of human and business benefits. “Technology has always been a story of decentralization,” he said. “From the printing press to the internet to bitcoin – technology has the power to distribute power to the masses and unleash human potential for good, and I’m convinced this is the next step.”
Source: cnbc.com