Down, Down, Down the TBD Road

A little over a year ago, I came across the term Web5 for the first time and got quite curious.

Like many, the reaction included wondering what this entailed, what's the connection with web3, and is this another blockchain thing. But after a deep dive and catching up, I got excited at the possibilities - helped that I was also interviewing for a role at the time.

As a developer advocate, the possibility of helping to shape the future of the web and the internet as a whole, was beyond appealing.

Since then, I've been working at TBD - a business unit at Block - and I've talked about these technologies that make up what we call Web5. Like many things, a name is just a label. The core pillars of Web5 actually lie in 3 amazing technologies:

• A way for people to own and control their own identity across the web in Decentralized Identifiers
• A way to issue, hold and make claims about the authenticity, and validity of things in Verifiable Credentials
• A way to store, share and control your own data in Decentralized Web Nodes.

All three of which are technologies being developed by standard bodies outside of TBD itself.

Just recently however, it was announced that the TBD business unit at Block would be winding down. Sad news, but thankfully, this doesn't mean the end of these technologies. They continue to be out there and the projects and SDKs that we've built at TBD are also open source.

With TBD winding down, it does affect another project I've been talking about for a while - tbDEX. tbDEX was intended to make use of some of the technologies above to help build a connected financial world - where everyone can move money across borders with way much ease. Sad to see it go.

What's next for me.

While I may no longer work directly on these projects, I am still a member of the DevRel team at Block - and there are many more exciting projects that bring tremendous values to the ecosystem that I'm happy to talk about in the coming days.

Block is still committed to open source technology, and you can keep up with everything we would be getting up to on the Block Open Source Discord server.

Follow me, my friend. To glory at the end.