NEW YORK – At a packed conference in Miami in June, Mr. Jack Dorsey pondered in front of thousands of attendees what his real passion was: “If I wasn’t on Square or Twitter, I would be working on Bitcoin.”
On Monday (November 29), Mr. Dorsey made up some of it, announcing that he would be leaving Twitter for the second time and handing over the position of CEO to a 10-year veteran of the company.
Often described as a puzzle with diverse interests from meditation to yoga to fashion design, the 45-year-old entrepreneur is eager to pursue his passion, which is centered around running Square and doing more philanthropic work, according to a source familiar with him to plan.
Long before the surprise news, Mr. Dorsey had laid the foundation for his next chapter and provided both companies with crypto-related projects.
Mr. Dorsey’s broader vision is based on the principle of “decentralization” or the idea that technology and finance should not be concentrated in a handful of gatekeepers as they are today, but should instead be controlled by the hands of many people or entities.
The concept has had an impact at Square, which has built a department dedicated to working on projects and awarding grants with the aim of increasing the popularity of Bitcoin around the world.
Mr Dorsey has long been a proponent of Bitcoin, and the appeal is that the cryptocurrency enable private and secure transactions with the value of Bitcoin that is unrelated to any government.
The idea has also underpinned new projects on Twitter where Mr Dorsey hired a top lieutenant – and now the company’s new CEO, Parag Agrawal – to oversee a team trying to build a decentralized social media protocol, that allows different social platforms to connect with each other, similar to email providers.
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The project, called Bluesky, aims to give users control over the types of content they see online and take the “burden” off companies like Twitter of enforcing a global policy to combat abuse or misleading information, Dorsey said in 2019 when speaking to Bluesky announced.
Bitcoin has also played a prominent role in its two companies. Square was one of the first public companies to have Bitcoin assets on its balance sheet after investing $ 220 million ($ 300 million) in the cryptocurrency.
In August, Square launched a new business unit called TBD, which will focus on Bitcoin. The company is also planning to build a hardware wallet for Bitcoin, a Bitcoin mining system and a decentralized Bitcoin exchange.
Twitter allows users to tip their favorite content creators with Bitcoin and is testing integrations with non-fungible tokens, a type of digital asset that people can use to collect unique digital art.
Analysts see the transition as a positive signal for Square, the fintech platform he co-founded in 2009.
Square’s core cash app saw slower growth last quarter after a bull run last year. It is also trying to digest the $ 29 billion acquisition of buy-now-pay-later provider Afterpay, its largest acquisition to date.
But these ambitions will only pay off in years, analysts warned.
“The blockchain platform they are trying to develop is great, but also full of technical challenges and difficult for consumers to scale. I think he’ll be more focused on Square and crypto will be a part of it, “said DA Davidson analyst Christopher Brendler.
