Jack Dorsey Calls BTC ‘Open Standard for Global Money Transmission’, Outlines Plans for ‘Block’

Dorsey’s statements come at a time when Bitcoin, along with other popular cryptocurrencies, is struggling to recover from a slowed down-market momentum.

By Radhika Parashar | Updated: 19 May 2022 14:09 IST

Jack Dorsey Calls BTC ‘Open Standard for Global Money Transmission’, Outlines Plans for ‘Block’

Photo Credit: Reuters

Jack Dorsey founded ‘Square’ in 2009 and rebranded it to ‘Block’ last year

Highlights

Jack Dorsey envisions Block as ‘an ecosystem of ecosystems’
Jack Dorsey aims to bring more BTC-related service to Block
Block already offers crypto services to users

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has reiterated his support for Bitcoin, the world's oldest and most valued cryptocurrency, during the Investor Day celebration of his online payments firm ‘Block' (formerly ‘Square'). Calling Bitcoin the “open standard for global money transmission”, Dorsey also predicted that BTC will soon serve as the native currency of the Internet. Dorsey's statements come at a time when Bitcoin, along with other popular cryptocurrencies, is struggling to recover from a slowed down-market momentum. At the time of writing, each Bitcoin was priced $29,130 (roughly Rs. 22 lakh). Its last all-time-high of $67,567 (roughly Rs. 52 lakh) was recorded in November 2021.

Dorsey's fintech firm ‘Square', founded in 2009, was rebranded to ‘Block' last year with the aim of making it more inclusive of blockchain and Web3 services.

During its investor day meeting, the former Twitter CEO announced the roadmap for Block in the coming days. He said he envisions Block as ‘an ecosystem of ecosystems', highlighting the current array of services this app offers.

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While Block was once an online payments platform, it has expanded its services into crypto and music streaming categories as well.

“We are no longer just a payments company. A lot has changed since our last investor day (2017),” CNBC quoted Dorsey as saying.

The 45-year-old tech mogul is looking to integrate more Bitcoin-related serviced to his Block app.

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In December last year, Block had allowed users of Cash App to exchange Bitcoin and stocks as gifts during the holiday season. Block is the parent company of Cash App.

“Internet requires a currency native to itself, and in looking at the entire ecosystem of technologies to fill this role, it's clear that Bitcoin is currently the only candidate,” Dorsey reportedly said. “Bitcoin's development may feel slow relative to other candidates, but that's a result of the deliberateness required to preserve the attributes necessary for money storage and transmission.”

Block already offers an open-source development platform called TBD for software engineers to use BTC and other blockchain technologies in order to ‘reinvent' the global financial system as we know it today.

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.
— jack:zap:️ (@jack) July 15, 2021

Dorsey, who is a strong crypto supporter, had also announced the development of a hardware wallet and service to make Bitcoin possession more mainstream

We're doing it #Bitcoin https://t.co/IwbKuBoXGv
— jack:zap:️ (@jack) July 8, 2021

The former Twitter chief also believes that Bitcoin's infamous, power-consuming Proof-of-Work (PoW) mining is actually important to keep BTC's decentralised element to its best state.

This opinion has garnered Dorsey much criticism on social media.

‘proof-of-work is effective in cases of regulatory capture‘

10 years ago I first witnessed how this ^ idea started to cause polarization effects in hacker space communities all around.

Folks like @jack turning into BTC maximalists doesn't inspire hope that this will end soon. pic.twitter.com/zJAVkMnXET
— Paul Fuxjäger (@fuxjaeger) May 17, 2022

On the contrary, Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX crypto exchange recently dismissed Bitcoin as a viable payment network option.

He also said that BTC's PoW mining takes it out of the race of becoming a widely adopted crypto payment option.

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Further reading: Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Twitter, Jack Dorsey

Radhika Parashar

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Radhika Parashar is a senior correspondent for Gadgets 360. She has been reporting on tech and telecom for the last three years now and will be focussing on writing about all things crypto. Besides this, she is a major sitcom nerd and often replies in Chandler Bing and Michael Scott references. For tips or queries you could reach out to her at RadhikaP@ndtv.com. More