Bitcoin might be in a prolonged slump that’s terrifying some investors. But the world’s most prominent cryptocurrency is still trading above $31,000 as of Friday morning. That might be less than half the $64,000 all-time-high price from mid-April, but it’s still well over the $20,000 highs from a few years ago. Despite the massive price swings, there’s enormous interest in bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies. It’s not just retail investors that have been pouring money into digital coins this year. More institutions made significant investments in the past few months, despite the volatility. While China continues to clamp down on virtual currencies, attempting to regulate the landscape, others want to offer new blockchain services. One of them is Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey, who just made the news with his new bitcoin-focused company.
It’s been a disastrous few months for Bitcoin investors who purchased cryptocurrency at record prices. It’s not just bitcoin that reached new all-time highs. Other coins saw similar swings to the upside, including ethereum and meme coin doge. But all of them tanked on bad bitcoin news. Elon Musk helped bitcoin and doge during their ascensions to record valuations earlier this year, and he took them down months later.
Bad bitcoin news from China aligned with Musk’s tweets to further stop bitcoin from rallying.
Dorsey just made Bitcoin news with TBD
Dorsey announced the news about his new bitcoin endeavor on Twitter. The Twitter and Square head expressed his views on cryptocurrency online before, including in exchanges on Twitter with Musk.
“Square is creating a new business (joining Seller, Cash App, & Tidal) focused on building an open developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services,” Dorsey tweeted. “Our primary focus is #Bitcoin. Its name is TBD.”
Like our new #Bitcoin hardware wallet, we’re going to do this completely in the open. Open roadmap, open development, and open source. @brockm is leading and building this team, and we have some ideas around the initial platform primitives we want to build.
— jack (@jack) July 15, 2021
It’s unclear whether Dorsey’s crypto company will be called TBD, or they didn’t decide on a name before announcing the news. The exec did create a temporary Twitter handle for the new company that hardly looks like the official Twitter handle for a bitcoin company: @TBD54566975. Dorsey will probably release more news when available.
Dorsey did say that everything about TBD would be open.
“Like our new #Bitcoin hardware wallet, we’re going to do this completely in the open. Open roadmap, open development, and open-source,” he said. adding that [Mike Brock] @brockm is leading and building this team, and we have some ideas around the initial platform primitives we want to build.”
Referring to Square Crypto, Dorsey added that “Square doesn’t give direction to @SqCrypto, only funding. They chose to work on LDK and are doing an incredible job! TBD will be focused on creating a platform business and will open source our work along the way.”
Bitcoin price unchanged
Will TBD be of any use to retail traders scared of the current bitcoin bloodbath? That’s to be decided. But Dorsey’s news didn’t impact the bitcoin price or market sentiment. Bitcoin is still ranging under $35,000, and it’s dropping towards $30,000 at the time of this writing.
