Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s new company, Block, is leading the charge to establish technology for the Bitcoin network that builds on both the company’s mission statement and Bitcoin’s founding principles.
Genesis Block
“If I were not at Square or Twitter I’d be working on bitcoin.”
Those are Jack Dorsey’s words[1] from Bitcoin 2021 in Miami. In less than a year since this statement, Dorsey has left Twitter and rebranded his other major company, financial services provider Square, to Block, further cementing his belief[2] that Bitcoin is the most important thing in our lifetime to work on.
Before Dorsey decided to go full-time with Block, the company, then known as Square, was tangentially involved with Bitcoin. By August 2018[3], users of Square’s payment app, Cash App, were able to buy and sell bitcoin in all 50 U.S. states. The significance of can easily be understated: for the first time, a fiat payment provider offered their customers the opportunity to directly buy bitcoin (neither Venmo or Robinhood allow users to send their bitcoin to a cold-storage wallet, so they cannot really be thought to offer “bitcoin” in a real way, though Robinhood offered bitcoin buys[4] before Cash App).
In October 2020, Square doubled down on its bitcoin venture by purchasing 4,709 bitcoin[5] to hold on its balance sheet. It has since added another 3,318 bitcoins to its balance sheet. It was not the first company to enter a bitcoin standard (Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy claims that title[6]), but the conviction shown by Square and its team before the most recent surge in bitcoin’s price should help you understand that nothing that has happened in the last couple of years was an
