Square Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said on Friday the fintech firm is looking to build a Bitcoin mining system based on custom silicon and open source for individuals as well as businesses.
This would add to Square's existing Bitcoin-focused projects including a business to build an open developer platform, as well as a hardware wallet for the cryptocurrency. Bitcoin price in India as of October 16 at 12:22pm IST was Rs. 48.25 lakhs.
Our team led by @jessedorogusker will start the deep technical investigation required to take on this project. We'd love your thoughts, ideas, concerns, and collaboration. Should we do this? Why or why not? We'll update this thread as we make our decisions. And now over to Jesse.
— jack⚡️ (@jack) October 15, 2021
"If we do this, we'd follow our hardware wallet model: build in the open in collaboration with the community," Dorsey said in a tweet. This will be completely open source like Square's previously announced hardware wallet for Bitcoin, which can be stored offline or online at cryptocurrency exchanges.
A team led by Square's hardware lead, Jesse Dorogusker, will investigate requisites for Square to take on the project to build a Bitcoin mining system.
In his Twitter thread, Dorsey also said that silicon design or chip design is too concentrated into a few companies, leading to supply constraints.
Shares of Square were up about 1 percent in extended trading.
On Friday, Bitcoin topped $60,000 (roughly Rs. 44.97 lakhs) for the first time in six months, since China's crackdown on Bitcoin trading and mining, as hopes grew that US regulators would allow a futures-based exchange-traded fund (ETF), a move likely to open the path to wider investment in digital assets.
© Thomson Reuters 2021
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