TBDEX: A LIQUIDITY PROTOCOL
Connecting the world of legacy money to the world of digital money
The web connected us all. But money and payments have not kept pace.
The legacy payments system is held together with proverbial duct tape that masks fundamental problems: final settlement of payments is slow, expensive, and never quite final. Risks get priced in as expensive account fees – or exclusion from the system itself. This hits the most economically disadvantaged the hardest.
A and system like Bitcoin shifts the paradigm to financial access. There are no credit checks or monthly account fees. Open, decentralized, and networks let you send money anywhere in the world, near instantly.
So now we have both legacy payment systems and new payment systems. But how do we get from the old to the new? tbDEX bridges the worlds of legacy money and digital money.
tbDEX is a decentralized, permissionless protocol. It opens the door to and access to the financial system for all. And because it abstracts away the complexity of decentralization, developers can focus on building great things.
Components
tbDEX Whitepaper
Whitepaper defining a decentralized liquidity protocol for exchanging assets.
Decentralized Web Node
An implementation of 's emerging decentralized personal datastore standard.
Decentralized Identifiers
Decentralized Identifiers are a W3C international standard for identifiers created, owned, and controlled by individuals, without reliance on centralized entities
Self-Sovereign Identity Service
An in-a-box service that handles the full Verifiable Credentials lifecycle, including issuance, verification, revocation, and more.
Actors
Wallets
wallets act as agents for individuals or institutions by facilitating exchanges with PFIs
Participating Financial Institutions (PFIs)
entities that offer liquidity services on the tbDEX network
Credential Issuer
organizations or individuals (by means of their wallet) who serve as a source of verifiable credentials
Use Cases
Proving your identity
Alice holds a digital wallet that securely manages all aspects of her identity, including her
, credentials, and for external apps and entities. Alice uses her wallet to request USD in exchange for 100 units of digital currency. Because Alice is from digital currency to fiat, most Participating Financial Institutions (PFIs) are required to verify Alice’s identity in order to fulfill their regulatory and compliance obligations. PFIs that are interested in fulfilling Alice’s request reply with a bid as well as their identity verification requirements for fulfillment. Alice chooses a bid which will need Know Your Customer (KYC) information (such as name, address, date of birth). Alice has already provided all of the necessary information to another PFI in the past. So Alice allows her wallet to provide a issued from the past PFI to the bidding PFI, along with the currency to exchange. The PFI verifies the credential and continues with fulfillment.
Data self-ownership
Bob holds a digital wallet and has granted it access to his transaction history, credentials, and other relevant preferences that are in his . Bob likes his wallet but is tempted to switch to a different one that has a feature his current wallet lacks. Bob downloads the new wallet and grants it permission to access his transactions, digital currency balances, and dark mode preference from his data store. Bob uses both wallets for a week and the data seamlessly syncs across the wallets. Bob decides that he prefers his old wallet over the new one. He revokes all permissions granted to the new wallet and uninstalls it.