How Jack Dorsey is preparing for a crypto future
Square co-founder Jack Dorsey is confident the internet will have a native currency like bitcoin and he is planning for the day when this enables the payments technology disrupter to be more of an internet company than a fintech.
Earlier this year the $US26.1 billion ($39 billion) company, which provides a range of technology to make it easier for small businesses to accept credit card payments, began hiring a small team of people to lead a bitcoin and cryptocurrency project, including former Google director Steve Lee as team leader.To date little has been known about the new project.Mr Dorsey, who is also the CEO and founder of Twitter, told The Australian Financial Review the two technology trends that would provide the most opportunity for disruption in financial services were artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency or blockchain. Square is tapping into the latter. “We take a lot from the open source community [people who write source code that’s available to the public and used to create new software] and we wanted to give something back in our space of financial technology,” he said.
“We’re hiring five open source engineers to work entirely on making the crypto ecosystem better. I think the internet will have a native currency and anything we can do to make that happen we’ll do.
“In the long term it will help us be more and more like an internet company where we can launch a product … and the whole world can use it, instead of having to go from market to market, to bank to bank to bank and from regulatory body to regulatory body.”
Mr Dorsey, who started Square in 2009, opened a Melbourne office in 2015 to support the growth of the company in the region.
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