Square CEO Jack Dorsey has confirmed that the company is looking into building a hardware bitcoin wallet that will give consumers greater control over the cryptocurrency they own.
“Square is considering making a hardware wallet for bitcoin. If we do it, we would build it entirely in the open, from software to hardware design, and in collaboration with the community. We want to kick off this thinking the right way: by sharing some of our guiding principles “. Square CEO Jack Dorsey on Twitter.
Shares of Square rose about 2.7% after Jack Dorsey’s comments.
Bitcoin transactions have become a booming business for Square, allowing consumers to make purchases using the Cash App and store the currency digitally. Bitcoin revenue at the company climbed to $4.75 billion last year from $516.5 million in 2019.
Dorsey is proposing a new way for users to store their bitcoin so that Square or any other company does not control it. A bitcoin wallet could allow users to store the cryptocurrency in a secure gadget and let them choose to spend it later.
The CEO went ahead to explain how the product will be different from other products by referring to how some exchanges currently work. PayPal, for example, lets you buy bitcoin, but it controls the “private key” and works, as Dorsey explains, more like an IOU. PayPal also doesn’t let customers move bitcoin to wallets outside of the PayPal ecosystem.
Jack Dorsey said Square might simplify how people hold bitcoin by creating assisted self-custody, which he said would make it easy for customers to spend a certain percentage of available funds from their phone while safely securing the rest of the money in the wallet. Dorsey said that integration with the Cash App is obvious but only part of the solution.
He also added that the solution doesn’t need to be owned by Square and that he’ll provide further thoughts if they decide to build the product.
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