🟪 Dorsey calls time

Jack Dorsey’s decentralized bitcoin project is no more

Author

Michael McSweeney
November 10, 2024

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RIP, Web5?

Jack Dorsey’s decentralized bitcoin/Web development project has come to an end.

The project, TBD, dates back to 2021 and appeared intended to serve as the development arm of a broader and at-times amorphous bitcoin initiative within Block, formerly square. TBD sat alongside a hardware play, BitKey, and Block’s mining business. 

Fast forward several years and, well, TBD is no more. 

“Within our emerging initiatives, we are refining our investments based on our progress. We are scaling back our investment in TIDAL and winding down TBD,” Dorsey wrote in a shareholder letter this week. “This gives us room to invest in our bitcoin mining initiative, which has strong product market fit and a healthy pipeline of demand, and Bitkey, our self-custody wallet for bitcoin.”

Along the way, TBD promised to re-re-reinvent the internet with its so-called Web5 identity initiative. The idea was to build it atop Bitcoin, and in 2023, TBD released a toolkit for developers to build decentralized identity apps. 

Precisely what drew the cuts isn’t clear, but it probably boiled down to dollars and cents: Block is trying to shrink costs and maybe Dorsey didn’t see TBD’s loftier ambitions supporting those aims. 

As for what Block is sticking with, the mining and hardware wallet businesses make sense. Bitcoin prices are cracking new all-time highs — accumulating more coins and creating ways to store it outside of centralized platforms makes a good bit of sense. 

TBD’s end is an unfortunate stumble in the never-ending quest to build meaningful identity solutions on the Web. It’s hard to look around — AI content and fake social media accounts abound — and not see a need for such tools. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like there’s much money to be made, at least not now. 

One can dream.

And now, on to the roundup:

— Michael McSweeney

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