Vitalik Buterin Tells How Jack Dorsey’s TBD Might Build the Bitcoin DEX

The success of DeFi (decentralized finance) blockchain apps has not escaped the notice of Square Payments (NYSE: SQ) CEO Jack Dorsey.

The engineer, businessman, and BTC advocate recently announced that his blockchain project, TBD, will enter the space by creating a Bitcoin DEX.

Vitalik Buterin “Skeptical” About Bitcoin DEX

In a recent interview, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin told Bloomberg Technology he wasn’t very impressed with the new endeavor.

Buterin thinks it fundamentally lacks a sense of the qualitative difference between Bitcoin and smart contract, Turing-complete chains like Ethereum among a growing field of others continuing to attract millions in capitalization.

Buterin said:

“I’m skeptical about these decentralized, finance-on-top-of-Bitcoin type of projects. So basically because the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum is that on Ethereum there is native functionality that allows you to essentially directly put either ETH or Ethereum-based assets into these smart contracts, into these lockboxes where there is then arbitrary conditions of any kind that can then govern how those assets get released.”

But a Bitcoin DEX would be different:

“Bitcoin does not have that functionality to the same extent. Jack is basically going to have to essentially create his own system that enforces those rules, and then on the Bitcoin layer the bitcoins will just have to be owned by, probably a multi-sig wallet controlled by Jack or just the participants in the system. It looks similar, but it will end up being something with a much weaker trust model.”

Dorsey has said the DEX will be completely decentralized and permissionless without himself or TBD exercising any different control over it as other peers on the network.

Jack Dorsey Likes Bitcoin’s “Principles, Creation Story, Resilience”

Jack Dorsey could be described as a Bitcoin maximalist. The Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) and Square Payments founder and CEO has said in the past he believes bitcoin will be the native currency of the Internet. He cites the crypto’s “principles,” its “creation story,” and its “resilience” as the reason why.

So it’s no surprise that Dorsey’s bitcoin-focused blockchain project has settled on creating a completely decentralized exchange (DEX) for the primary digital asset.

Doing so would elaborate the cryptocurrency’s principles of decentralization and permissionless architecture to a qualitatively new level of functionality.