Why TBD's Mike Brock Is Skeptical That Decentralized Applications Will Become Popular - Ep.337

Mike Brock, general manager of TBD at Block, discusses how TBD’s yet-to-be-released DEX is structured, explains why he thinks decentralized solutions do not necessarily need blockchains, and tells the humorous story about how Jack Dorsey convinced him to start working on a Bitcoin project. Show highlights: what TBD is and what its relation to Block (formerly Square) is how TBD differs from Spiral, another Block-based Bitcoin firm how tbDEX works and why building on-ramps and off-ramps to crypto is so important who will be supplying the liquidity for tbDEX why Mike is passionate about creating digital identity infrastructure how tbDEX will incorporate digital identity tooling into its protocol what Mike thinks about Vitalik Buterin’s misgivings concerning tbDEX’s design why Mike fell down the rabbit hole (thanks Jack Dorsey) what lessons Mike learned at CashApp that he is using at TBD which stablecoin TBD will be working with why Mike is not a believer in DeFi why tbDEX (or, seemingly, other TBD products) will not utilize tokens Thank you to our sponsors! Crypto.com: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/unconfirmedcardearnfeb2021 Beefy Finance: https://beefy.finance Cross River Bank: https://crossriver.com/crypto Galaxis: https://galaxis.xyz/ Episode Links Mike Brock Twitter; https://twitter.com/brockm LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-brock-9030813/ Introduction to TBD: https://twitter.com/brockm/status/1415795490914856961 TBD Twitter: https://twitter.com/tbd54566975?lang=en GitHub: https://github.com/TBD54566975/tbdex-whitepaper Whitepaper https://tbd54566975.ghost.io/introducing-tbdex/ https://tbdex.io/whitepaper.pdf Careers: https://block.xyz/careers?search=tbd Other Origin of name: https://twitter.com/TBD54566975/status/1424818221652324355 Vitalik’s reticence: https://cryptopotato.com/vitalik-buterin-tells-how-jack-dorseys-tbd-might-build-the-bitcoin-dex/ Other Topics Spiral (lightning development). Brock helped set up Spiral. Twitter: https://twitter.com/spiralbtc Website: https://spiral.xyz/ CashApp Impressive BTC revenue: https://decrypt.co/93793/block-bitcoin-earnings-cash-app-hit-nearly-2-billion-q4 Lightning network: https://blockworks.co/cash-app-integrates-lightning-network-for-bitcoin-payments/ Aaron Levie https://twitter.com/levie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices