Jack Dorsey, CEO and co-founder of Bitcoiner and Block Inc., was very reluctant to buy into the idea that his company’s customers were embracing stablecoins.
“We don’t like supporting stablecoins, but our customers want to use them,” he said. wired. “I don’t think it’s wise to keep one gatekeeper from another to another.”
Dorsey’s hesitant embrace of stablecoins isn’t exactly a heel turn, but it is a departure from his allegiance to the first and largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
Dorsey is a BTC enthusiast and has compared Bitcoin to Bitcoin. Bitcoin From white papers to “poetry”. In the same 2020 podcast interview, he told MIT researcher Rex Friedman that he was relieved to know that Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto would remain anonymous.
“I think it was smart not to do it anonymously and to do it as a pseudonym rather than as a real identity, because I think it gives you some concreteness and a little bit of empathy that this is a person, or a group of people behind it. There’s this natural identity that I can imagine,” Dorsey said.
He founded the Crypto Open Patent Alliance in 2020 and later successfully challenged computer scientist Craig Wright’s “false narrative” that he was Nakamoto in court.
In the same interview, wiredHe was very careful to clarify that the block is working with Bitcoin, not cryptocurrencies in general, “because we believe the internet needs open protocols for transferring money.”
Block has embraced Bitcoin in a variety of ways, including offering to buy and sell Bitcoin through the Cash App, enabling Bitcoin payments through Square merchant terminals, and developing a hardware wallet and modular mining rig system.
The reference to stablecoins is likely a reference to what Block Business Head Owen Jennings said during an earnings call in February. During the conference call, he told investors that the company is rolling out a new core payment flow.
“Importantly, it is related to Moneybot and is also a flow built to support stablecoins,” he told investors. “So (we) will continue to make adjustments there and roll it out to 100%.”
Moneybot is an agent AI assistant integrated into Cash App by Block. The company said the “always-on” assistant provides “contextual insights and actionable suggestions based on customers’ in-app activity.”
However, as announced in late February, the integration of Agent AI cost the company approximately 4,000 jobs, or 40% of its workforce.
“Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company,” Dorsey said in a letter to staff shared with X. “The tools we’re building will allow even fairly small teams to do more and do better.”
