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Bitcoin [BTC] mining system is coming to Jack Dorsey’s Square

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Jack Dorsey, the founder of Square, has announced reviewing plans to build a decentralized Bitcoin [BTC] mining system based on custom-designed silicon intending to make it more accessible to both retailers and large institutions on a global scale. In his latest tweet, the CEO of the social media giant, Twitter pointed out the current BTC mining scenario in terms of distribution, energy efficiency, concentration, etc, and stressed the urgent need to transform the prevalent system. Revealing more about the master plan he said,

“Square is considering building a Bitcoin mining system based on custom silicon and open source for individuals and businesses worldwide. If we do this, we’d follow our hardware wallet model: build in the open in collaboration with the community. First some thoughts and questions.”

Accordingly, Dorsey said the proposed project, if successful, would align with the ideals of Square’s own hardware wallet model i.e, to build an open-source and in collaboration with the community as a whole. In his tweet, the CEO also revealed that the technical specifics would be handled by its team of engineers led by Hardware Exec Jesse Dorogusker and concluded the post by hoping for suggestions or queries from the community with regards to its proposed plan.

The latest details caused the price of Bitcoin [BTC] to surge briefly and climb nearly $62,700. This was enough to send the market investors into a frenzy, renewing hopes to cross the all-time high of $64,863. At the time of writing, BTC was trading at $61,521 after an increase of 3.57% in the past 24-hours.

Jack Dorsey’s tryst with Bitcoin [BTC]

The Twitter head is known for his staunch support towards the crypto industry and has always been a big Bitcoin bull. In September this year, the micro-blogging website officially integrated Bitcoin tipping services through Lightning Network [LN] focused third-party payment app, Strike. MicroStrategy’s CEO Michael Saylor, on Twitter, shared a video of Strike Founder Jack Mallers showing how the firm’s API integration had opened up opportunities for a faster and unified global remittance payment system.

In addition to that, Square recently doubled up its BTC investment from $220 million to $470 million adding 8,027 Bitcoins in its reserve ranking third behind blockchain intelligence company Microstrategy and Elon Musk-led Tesla.

TBD Bitcoin DEX: Jack Dorsey talks about the new division

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Twitter chief Jack Dorsey’s love for Bitcoin isn’t a new story. Time and again, the tattooed entrepreneur has made the world’s largest cryptocurrency his topmost priority and is doing everything to make Bitcoin the global currency of the internet. Dorsey had first mentioned Square’s brainchild “TBD,” BTC-centric DEX.

While sharing a Twitter thread written by Mike Brock, who happens to be the TBD lead at the payment firm, Dorsey revealed details about the direction of the initiative.

Brock’s tweet regarding the same read,

“There’s been a lot of speculation about what TBD is and isn’t. Over the last few weeks our team has been determining what needs to be determined. We wanted to finally share our direction, and we have some questions. We believe Bitcoin will be the native currency of the internet. While there are many projects to help make the internet more decentralized, our focus is solely on a sound global monetary system for all. But including all requires a few pieces we think are missing.”

TBD Bitcoin DEX’s Objective

The exec revealed that the main objective behind the creation of the decentralized exchange is to address a critical issue in purchasing Bitcoin which typically involves exchanging fiat at a centralized and custodial service such as the CashApp of Coinbase. He mentioned that these on- and off-ramps to Bitcoin are plagued with a number of problems and argued that they aren’t distributed evenly across the world.

This is the problem that TBD aims to solve by making it seamless to fund a non-custodial wallet anywhere in the world with a platform to build on- and off-ramps into Bitcoin. This can be thought of as a decentralized exchange for fiat, Brock asserted.

He further stressed that the platform will be entirely developed in the public, open-source, open protocol, and any wallet will be able to use. There will be no foundation or governance model that TBD controls – In short, “Permissionless or bust.” He further went on to add,

“And here’s the question and challenge: what projects exist today to help us solve these problems in a Bitcoin native way? Now that we’ve determined our direction, you’ll hear a lot more from us as we progress. But for now, Thanks Bitcoin Denizens!”

Jack Dorsey’s Square to buy Afterpay for $39B in Australia’s largest-ever buyout

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Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s digital financial platform Square has announced its plans to acquire ASX-listed buy now pay later behemoth Afterpay in an all-stock deal. At $29 billion, the transaction for the entire deal is said to be Australia’s biggest-ever buyout.

The founders of Afterpay, Nick Molnar and Anthony Eisen will continue to hold the position with the company.

Jack Dorsey asserted that both Square and Afterpay have a shared purpose to create a business to make the financial system fair, accessible, and inclusive. The exec claimed that the Australian ‘buy now, pay later’ firm Afterpay, has built a trusted brand aligned with those principles. Dorsey went on to add that company’s buy now, pay later feature would be implemented with its Seller and Cash app products.

“Together, we can better connect our Cash App and Seller ecosystems to deliver even more compelling products and services for merchants and consumers, putting the power back in their hands.”

The main objective behind this acquisition is to facilitate the two entities to deliver innovative financial products and services that foster access to more users and encourage incremental revenue for merchants of all sizes. According to the official press release by the payment juggernaut, the transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022, if all the closing conditions are met.

Commenting on the latest development, Alyssa Henry, Lead of Square’s Seller business stated,

“Buy now, pay later has been a powerful growth tool for sellers globally. We are thrilled to not only add this product to our Seller ecosystem but to do it with a trusted and innovative team.”

Square’s Bitcoin Revenue

Cash App, which happens to be the peer-to-peer payments service of the payment firm Square, raked in $2.72 billion in Bitcoin revenue in the second quarter of 2021. Interestingly, the yearly revenues rose by 200%. Announcing the impressive earnings figures, Square also revealed that its Bitcoin service accounted for the lion’s share of its total net revenue of $4.68 billion for the second quarter which was up by 143% year over year despite a series of market corrections.

Bitcoin revenue and gross profit declined from the first quarter of the year because of unstable prices that had an adverse effect on the trading activity as opposed to prior quarters.

Jack Dorsey to elevate Square’s crypto presence with the launch of Bitcoin DeFi services

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The CEO of Twitter and Square, Jack Dorsey, has always made sure to stay relevant in the crypto-verse. With Square, Dorsey hopes to bolster his presence in the crypto market with his imminent launch of Bitcoin DeFi services.

Decentralized Finance, aka DeFi, has made a notable impression in the financial world. With its lending and borrowing services skyrocketing, space has managed to lure in an array of people. DeFi has more Ethereum and other networks taking the lead, while Bitcoin is often seen in the backseat. While the total number of ETH locked in DeFi amounts to 9.4 million, the amount of BTC stacked in the market is only 181.9K. This disparity speaks volumes.

In order to spruce up the presence of Bitcoin in the DeFi space, Jack Dorsey is reportedly building a platform that employs the Bitcoin network to avail of the services provided by the DeFi market.

Jack Dorsey to spruce up the DeFi space with BTC

In a series of tweets, Dorsey revealed that Square would be teaming up with platforms like Seller, Cash App as well as Tidal to roll out a Bitcoin-centric DeFi platform. His tweet read,

“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. Our primary focus is #Bitcoin. Its name is TBD.”

With Mike Brock as the head of this platform, the entire program will be open. From open roadmap to open development as well as open-source, TBD will have the eyes of the public on it.

Additionally, Jack Dorsey pointed out how Square was different from TBD. He noted that Square only provided funding and not direction.

Furthermore, Brock revealed his excitement in joining the team and stated,

“As @jack said, we’re going to be biasing towards being open and transparent. So we’ll be sharing a lot more about our plans in the coming days and weeks. We’re also going to be thinking of ways to include the community in our planning. So stay tuned!”

Jack Dorsey’s Square platform to refrain from buying anymore Bitcoin [BTC]

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The founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey has time and again revealed his interest in crypto, particularly Bitcoin. Dorsey was so fond of BTC that he even went on to mention the asset on his Twitter bio. However, now, Dorsey’s payments platform, Square has revealed that the company would no longer purchase any additional Bitcoin than it already has.

Speaking at a recent interview, Amrita Ahuja, the chief financial officer of Square addressed the platform’s interest in Bitcoin and its future plans with regard to the king coin. While the Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey-led platform has already about $200 million worth of Bitcoin, its financial officer noted that this would be it.

Jack Dorsey’s Square will not add on to its $200 million worth of BTC

Jack Dorsey’s Square platform went on to buy several Bitcoins throughout 2020 and this year. While this amounted to a total of $200 million, the platform announced that for now it was done making investments. Ahuja said,

“We don’t have any plans at this point to make further purchases. There’s no plans at this point to re-evaluate where we are from a treasury standpoint.”

Bitcoin [BTC] witnessed a steep fall over the last couple of days. As the community continues to send out angry tweets at Elon Musk, the price of BTC was back below $50K. At the time of writing, Bitcoin was trading for $48,717 with a 2% drop in the last 24-hours. Despite this, Ahuja noted that there were several “opportunities” for the platform to “learn with Bitcoin.”

Albeit this, Ahuja did not entirely shoot down the potential purchase of the king coin. She added,

“We’re always evaluating and as ever, I think we’d be customer-led. [..] As we see the evolution of the bitcoin product or crypto products in general, I think we’ll make further assessments at that point.”

Additionally, the market cap of BTC was seen crumbling down below $900 billion. This further impacted the overall market cap which was noted at $2.28 trillion.

JPMorgan Files With SEC To Launch Debt Linked To 11 Cryptocurrency-focused Firms

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Wall Street investment banking company, JPMorgan Chase is set to roll-out debt instruments that are connected to 11 cryptocurrency-focused companies. In the latest development, the financial services behemoth has reportedly filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] about a new debt instrument to enable its investor clients to gain exposure to the cryptocurrency market in the form of public-company stocks involved with digital assets.

The latest stint happens to be JPMorgan’s first-ever material mention of Bitcoin. This comes as a surprise welcome as Jamie Dimon, the CEO of the bank has not been a fan of Bitcoin and had also called the crypto-asset a “fraud”.

The prosepectus read,

“The notes are designed for investors who seek exposure to the performance of the J.P. Morgan Cryptocurrency Exposure Basket (Mar 2021) of 11 unequally weighted Reference Stocks, which we refer to as the Basket, as reduced by the Basket Deduction of 1.50%. Notwithstanding the name of the Basket, the notes do not provide direct exposure to cryptocurrencies and the performance of the Basket may not be correlated with the price of any particular cryptocurrency, such as bitcoin.”

According to the documentation details on the official edict, JPMorgan’s Cryptocurrency Exposure Basket (Mar 2021) is described as an “unequally weighted basket consisting of 11 Reference Stocks of U.S.-listed companies” that operate businesses directly and indirectly related to cryptocurrencies

JPMorgan’s Crypto Exposure Basket Also Features MicroStrategy, PayPal among others

The upcoming debt instrument was a major development in the cryptocurrency space. Perfectly timed with the market-wide bullish reversal, JPMorgan’s news suggests that sentiment of the previously skeptic Wall Street biggies as cryptocurrency quietly appeared atop the chart surpassing stocks to bonds, oil, banks, gold, and tech stocks.

Also, it was the inclusion of some of the big names in the industry that was interesting. JPMorgan’s “basket” of companies include enterprise software and Bitcoin holder, MicroStrategy, payments companies including PayPal.

Other companies also include Jack Dorsey-led Square, Riot Blockchain, NVIDIA, AMD, semiconductor giant TSMC, Intercontinental Exchange, CME Group, Overstock and Silvergate. This “basket” is tasked with developing support for cryptocurrency into its app.

Square Encounters Trouble With Craig Wright

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Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter rolled out Square to venture into the crypto-verse. The platform recently launched COPA [Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance] to aid cryptocurrency firms to deal with issues pertaining to copyrights. While the crypto industry lauded this move, Craig Wright seemed to be having an issue with the same.

Square Hits Back With COPA

In a recent tweet, Square revealed that Ontier LLP, a law firm representing self-proclaimed inventor of Bitcoin, Craig Wright, sent out a letter to the firm suggesting that he decided to enforce his copyright on the Bitcoin White Paper. The law firm gave Square 14 days to answer the letter. While the last day of the deadline was 4 February, Square decided to employ COPA for this. The letter read,

“We consider that this is a straightforward copyright infringement claim, and accordingly would ask you to respond to this letter within 14 days, i.e. by 4pm GMT on 4 February 2021.

Square, however, made use of COPA and responded to the letter.

The payments platform hit back with a,” We don’t care who created bitcoin, just who didn’t.”

While it is evident that Wright is still sticking to his narrative of him inventing that first and largest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. Ontier wrote in its letter to Dorsey’s platform,

“We should add that our client, and others associated with him, have further rights relating to the Bitcoin technology and the Bitcoin name. It is their firm intention to enforce such rights in due course. The writing of this letter and any settlement or judgment relating to the infringement of our client’s copyright in the White Paper, are entirely without prejudice to the enforcement in due course of such further rights.”

Amidst this, the Wright continues to deal with the Kleiman case. While that case is delayed to June 2021, Wright and his family continue to win several other lawsuits.

Jack Dorsey Continues To Endorse Bitcoin; Square Rolls Out Platform To Aid Crypto Innovation

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Over the years cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin caught the eye of prominent personalities across the globe. While the coin was made for the average Joe to break from the shackles of centralized institutions, several authorities and notable people took a keen interest in Bitcoin.  Founder and CEO of a prominent social network company, Twitter, Jack Dorsey have been a great supporter of the crypto-verse and continues to support Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Is The Best Manifestation Of An Internet Currency

In a recent interview with Reuters, Dorsey pointed out that the internet was need of a native currency and believes that Bitcoin has fulfilled the same. He further suggested that no other coin could fill Bitcoin’s shoes as the native currency of the internet.

Highlighting the importance of toolmakers or developers, Dorsey detailed that it was essential for toolmakers like him to make Bitcoin easily available to people. He also stressed on how it’s his job to make it easy for individuals to understand as well as utilize the digital asset effectively.

Dorsey went on to elaborate on the plans he had to make Bitcoin easy and feasible for the community. He said,

“One is just transaction times and efficiency. So making it cost-effective and making it time-effective. The second is, intuitive to people; that they understand why they might use it, they understand where it is, and they can access it in a way that feels similar to just handing over paper cash.”

Almost every other coin that has entered the crypto-verse have tried to resolve the shortcomings of the king coin, however, Dorsey believes that Bitcoin should be built in such a way that is it “as intuitive as fast and as efficient” as it is today.

No More Stifles To Innovation

In other news, Dorsey’s payments company, Square rolled out a platform dedicated to preventing companies from locking innovations pertaining to cryptocurrencies in patents. The Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance [COPA] is a non-profit platform that hopes to aid in the growth of cryptocurrency technology.

The platform is reportedly open for membership and members would be required to pledge for the availability of their patents via a shared library. The announcement further read,

“As more members join and declare that they won’t offensively assert their patents against others, the overall incidence and threat of patent litigation comes down.”

Dorsey’s latest move seems beneficial to the crypto ecosystem, however, Square revealed that it was open to feedback with regard to its new platform.

Square Crypto Funds “The Eye of Satoshi” Bitcoin Lightning Network Watchtower

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Square Crypto has been dispensing out grants to developers working on free, open source projects that underpin the future burgeoning of both the Bitcoin and Lightning networks. This time around, its latest allocation went to a watchtower service for the Bitcoin Lightning.

The digital currency creation division of Jack Dorsey’s Square payments company, Square Crypto, has offered to sponsor the Eye of Satoshi, a Lightning Network watchtower that keeps track of blockchain transactions to shield the users on the layer-two scaling solution.

The Eye of Satoshi watchtower comes from the Spanish developer Talaia. Watchtowers were introduced to the Lightning Network back in 2019 to act as a reserve service option for tracking blockchain transactions when your Lightning software is inactive. Indeed, with the Eye of Satoshi observing, it is impossible for peers to block the channel and grab your crypto.

“If your Lightning Network software is ‘offline’—as in it isn’t actively monitoring the blockchain—you need a third-party that can keep watch for you. This could be because you’re running a lightweight wallet, aren’t actively using your wallet, or your Lightning Network node crashes. This is what watchtowers do.” highlighted Square Crypto on Twitter.

Square Crypto highlights the benefits of having watchtowers in place

Currently, Talaia operates on C-Lightning and will also work with different Lightning Network enactments. Additionally, Square Crypto noted that there will be several advantages of the Eye of Satoshi than just keeping an eye on blockchain transactions. According to the funding firm, the watchtower protects the network’s users from some type of attacks.

Square Crypto is an arm of major Fintech firm Square, founded and run by the also CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. Dorsey is famous in the cryptocurrency industry for his support for Bitcoin. Moreover, Dorsey is not only an oral supporter of Bitcoin but he also practically purchases a full Bitcoin every week, utilizing Square Cash App. Furthermore, the Twitter CEO has also set up a task force at the social media giants to develop a decentralized version of Twitter. 

Square’s Profits Shoot up as Bitcoin Trade Becomes Ace Up Its Sleeve

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Cryptocurrency-based companies have enjoyed unusual success over the past few months, especially with the advent of Bitcoin’s price rise. This unprecedented success rate could also be attributed to more and more people entering the digital asset industry.

Square, the payment services provider founded by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey recently revealed its 4th quarter earnings for Cash App which has pleasantly surprised its investors. 

According to the figures released by the company, Cash App’s focus on bringing more apps into its fold has been one of its biggest upsides. As of December 2019, Cash App had more than 24 million active customers per month, a rise of 60 per cent compared to 2018. Bitcoin trading on the Cash App is quite popular, and that popularity has also been translated into dividends.

Cash App reported revenue of Bitcoin to be $178 million between November 1st and December 31st. Profits during the same period amounted to $3 million, a 50% improvement between Q2 and Q3 2018. All other earnings on the platform were estimated to be $183 million.

Post the release, Amrita Ahuja, the Chief Financial Officer [CFO] of Square stated:

“We are able to efficiently acquire customers, keep them engaged and show them additional ways we can continue to add value.”

According to the CFO, as Cash App users start using cryptocurrency services, they generally start producing more revenue for the company. This may be due to multiple options available in the domain of cryptocurrencies than in the world of fiat. The company as a whole generated profits of $8 million on $516 million in annual sales from Bitcoin.

Financial reports from the company have revealed that Square spent a total of $174.4 million on Bitcoin services in Q4 2019. The overall business budget was $508 million, which was much higher than the $164.8 million invested in 2018. Cash App was a major contributor to Square’s sales, which was estimated to be $1.31 billion last year.

Many estimates, such as subscription and service-based sales, increased by 45% to $281.4 million. Services that are not really based on cryptocurrencies have been a major moneymaker because of their ease of use. Square’s gross payment amount also increased by 25% to $28.64 million.

The gross volume amount is significant because it reflects the total dollar spent on transactions or products. The company’s transaction-based revenue increased 25% to $832.2 million. Square’s stock has definitely increased in the markets, with the firm receiving 23 cents per share, which was more than the analyst expected by 21 cents per share.

Analysts argue that if square succeeds in growing its Bitcoin business around the globe, particularly in regions with hyperinflation, it will have a massive advantage on fiat. Square is also expected to expand its payments sector through emerging regions such as Africa.