Jack Dorsey, co-founder, and CEO of both Square and Twitter (NYSE:TWTR), released a white paper Friday detailing plans for Square's decentralized Bitcoin (BTC) exchange tbDEX. Unlike most decentralized exchanges, or DEXs, tbDEX will not utilize a trustless model, and therefore will not feature its own governance token. Instead, it is a message protocol designed to facilitate trust relationships without relying on a federation to control access.
The tbDEX also intends to include many features that make it far less decentralized than a DEX in the truest sense of the word. For starters, the protocol requires that all participants to pass background know-your-customer, or KYC, checks to comply with relevant regulations depending on a user's region. Users can only then connect their wallets to the exchange and swap coins with one another.