When Elon Musk tweeted environmental concerns about Bitcoin in June, sparking the crypto market correction, it was his friend Dorsey who slid into the comments to push back. The playful exchange culminated in today's "The B Word" event, where Elon, Jack and Cathie Wood will engage in dialogue on Bitcoin. Dorsey's Square and Wood's ARK Invest previously collaborated on a white paper about Bitcoin's potential to catalyze a green energy revolution. They'll be joined today by someone who can help with that cause.

The Twitter co-founder's profile on the social media platform is one word: #Bitcoin. At the recent Bitcoin 2021 conference, he said "Bitcoin changes absolutely everything. I don’t think there’s anything more important in my lifetime to work on.” This week Dorsey announced Square will launch an entirely new Bitcoin business focused on creating an "open developer platform" to make it easer to provide non-custodial, decentralized financial services. The initiative will feature “open roadmap, open development and open source.”

Square's CashApp was the first mainstream fintech app to enable Bitcoin trading (in January 2018). Square became the second publicly traded company to buy Bitcoin on its corporate balance sheet, when it purchased $50 million BTC in October 2020, which it followed with a $170 million add-on investment in February 2021. Bitcoin has been big business for Square. In its Q1 earnings report, Square reported $3.5 billion in Bitcoin revenue, up 11 times year over year, although profit from that business was only $75 million. Dorsey, however, doesn't appear keen on centralizing operations or profiting further on Square's Bitcoin business. In fact, he is actively working to push Bitcoin back to its open-source roots. Last week, we reported on Square's decision to make a hardware wallet for Bitcoin, in hopes of making self-custody easier for users of the network.

——————————————————————

Registration for SALT New York is now open! Join us September 13-15, 2021 and sign up at https://register.salt.org/event/411f76d9-c215-4719-9bc4-8dfac6cfacdd/summary

Watch this video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/XExsfyYQ0Rs

Moderated by Anthony Scaramucci, John Darsie and Brett Messing. Developed, created and produced by SALT Venture Group, LLC.