During the opening day of Web Summit Rio today, TBD, one of four businesses at Block, formerly known as Square — the financial conglomerate co-founded by Twitter’s ex-CEO Jack Dorsey — officially announced the global availability of the first set of software development kits (SDKs) of its platform tbDEX.
It is an open-sourced, decentralized messaging protocol aimed at enabling people and businesses to make transactions at significantly lower costs and across the globe, not only using legacy payment rails but also new transactional instruments, such as cryptocurrencies and stablecoins. “There is a lot of infrastructure to be built to allow bitcoin and other technologies to be used at a larger scale, as in payments. tbDEX is part of it, as it allows things to be traded in a trustworthy way,” says TBD CEO Mike Brock.
To be effective, tbDEX has to be connected to local payment and transactional schemes, which has to happen through fintech companies also connected to TBD’s protocol. Mr. Brock announced TBD’s two first partner fintechs in Latin America: Bankaya, a Mexican app that offers digital saving accounts to over 1.4 million people, and Conduit, a U.S.-based API provider that helps businesses of all sizes to move money between Latin American and African markets and the U.S., among other locations, at scale. They are interested in building their transactional solutions on top of TBD’s new protocol.
While Bankaya is primarily interested in connecting their previously underserved customers in Mexico to friends and family members in the U.S., for Conduit, which is focused on B2B transactions, one of the most pressing issues is predictability.
“Today, a client contacted me to say they didn’t know where their money was. It was sent from Kenya through a Swift transaction but had not arrived at its destination in the U.S. Most of our work has to do with it, tracking transactions from end to end and avoiding extra charges from intermediaries, which often demands us to ‘manually’ interfere, that is, send an email to someone at a bank,” Kirill Gertman, CEO and co-founder of Conduit, describes to The Brazilian Report.
The startup also works with stablecoins, a much faster transactional option for businesses to move money than legacy rails. “The problem with stablecoins is another; it is related to the fact that banks often find them suspicious, but this can also be solved through TBD’s protocol,” explains Mr. Gertman. Currently in talks with at least three Brazilian banks, Conduit is working to build its local connections before connecting its services for Brazilian companies to TBD.
As Mr. Brock explained, tbDEX uses decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and verifiable credentials (VCs) to validate counterparty identity and trust securely. “If you don’t have an ID, you don’t exist, which is a big problem in financial services. We are trying to develop things holistically when we think about serving unbanked people. Having alternative ways to prove identity is key to truly decentralized systems,” explains Emily Chiu, COO at TBD. Despite calling Latin fintechs partners, Ms. Chiu recalled that TBD does not require formal partnerships. “Anyone can start writing with tbDEX; no permission is needed.”
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