Jack Dorsey’s TBD partners with Circle. The partnership aims to improve people’s access to dollar-linked stablecoins in countries with rapidly devaluing currencies.
TBD, a division of Jack Dorsey’s Block (SQ) that specializes in Bitcoin, is collaborating with Circle Internet Finance, the company that created the USDC stablecoin, to offer investors around the world cross-border transfers and savings using stablecoins that are linked to the dollar. The organizations announced their alliance Wednesday during Circle’s Converge22 conference in San Francisco.
Block is a payments startup that operates Cash App and is managed by Twitter co-founder and famous Bitcoin (BTC) proponent Jack Dorsey. Its filial, TBD, is an open-source developer platform that has been working on a decentralized crypto exchange called TBDex. TBD has been working on a so-called Web5 decentralized identity initiative that would allow people to retain their user data and interact with each other without intermediaries.
TBD Battle Against Inflation
Various government-issued currencies’ value nosedived against the U.S. dollar owing to high inflation globally and aggressive tightening of monetary policy. People in countries with rapidly depreciating currencies, like Argentina or Turkey, turned to cryptocurrencies to protect their savings from loss due to depreciation. U.S. dollar-linked stablecoins also became a common alternative for savings and remittances to get around local capital controls and enable more affordable transactions.
Emily Chiu, TBD’s chief operating officer believes that Bitcoin may replace the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency of the future. In order for developers to expand on the infrastructure and crypto wallet providers to integrate into the open-source protocol, TBD and Circle’s collaboration aims to lay the groundwork for stablecoin access globally. This entails creating the necessary connections—on-ramps and off-ramps—between the conventional fiat currencies issued by governments and the digital currencies based on blockchains.
Circle CEO Hints That Blockchain Industry is Transitioning from Dial-up to Broadband Phase
According to Jeremy Allaire, CEO of stablecoin issuer Circle, who spoke at the Converge22 conference in San Francisco, the world is finally transitioning from the speculative value phase of cryptocurrency to the utility phase. According to Allaire, there are currently on-chain mechanisms to ensure safe, trustworthy interactions between crypto users. However, there need to be “advancements” in technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs that prove identities and credentials while simultaneously ensuring individuals’ privacy
“People need to be able to interact with apps, services, and content and transactions without knowing that they’re using crypto. I don’t know if I’m using SMTP [Simple Mail Transfer Protocol] when sending an email with Gmail, but a lot of people don’t know that, and that’s okay”.
Finally, Allaire said we are reaching the next “broadband” phase of blockchain, referencing the dial-up era in the early days of the internet.
“We need safe, scalable and energy-efficient public blockchains” just as we did with the internet, he stated, raising the example of new developments such as Ethereum’s recent move to proof-of-stake and the emergence of layer-2 and layer-1 scaling models”.
He said the step was “necessary for blockchain to become something that is used by everyday society for mission-critical applications.”
