Payments company Square released its second-quarter earnings on Thursday, revealing its crypto-friendly Cash App made $125 million in revenue from bitcoin this quarter. This is nearly twice as much as it made in the preceding quarter.
The higher revenue led to a $2 million gross profit purely from bitcoin alone. In the earnings report, the explanation for this massive leap in sales is put down to increased trading volume in bitcoin, largely due to the recent pump in price.
Square's bitcoin sales have been increasing, and accelerating, for the last five quarters. In Q1, 2019, it registered a record-high $65.5 million in revenue and $832,000 in profit.
"We love you, Bitcoin,” Jack Dorsey, head of Square and Twitter CEO, openly said it the earnings call to discuss the recent performance. While the investor in Lightning Labs—which is building a second layer scaling solution for the Bitcoin network—has been relatively outspoken on Twitter and Joe Rogan’s podcast, this was the first time he had expressed such sentiment in an earnings call.
The bitcoin community is trying to design the “Satoshi symbol”
The bitcoin community is trying its hand at design. Discussion over which symbol should be used to represent the satoshi—the smallest unit of bitcoin, named after its inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto—has resurfaced. After a lengthy Reddit discussion back in March, and many proposed posts since, the issue is once again back on the agenda. Jack Dorsey, Square’s co-founder retweeted a post by Desiree Dickerson, head of operations at Lightning Labs, asking for a satoshi symbol to be crowdsourced. And, as...
Dorsey himself may have contributed to the increase in revenue Cash App has seen this year. He told Marty Bent, on Tales from the Crypt, in March, that he had been buying bitcoin on Cash App—maxing out his weekly limits.
Square has also been upping its focus on crypto. Its crypto-focused subsidiary Square Crypto has been hiring blockchain engineers (paid in bitcoin if they wish) and designers to help make Bitcoin more user-friendly. It has also been engaging with the crypto community to discuss whether there needs to be a symbol for the smallest unit of bitcoin—the satoshi. But so far, good suggestions have been few and far between.
