Disclaimer: This article has been updated following revisions.
Jack Dorsey, the founder of social media website Twitter and mobile payments provider Square, went into depth on his plans for his new team dedicated to improving the crypto sector at Square in an interview with The Next Web on June 14.
According to Dorsey, this initiative, Square Crypto, will add to the fiat payment company’s operations by providing an infrastructure for frictionless internet payments. Right now, he says that regulations and partnerships slow Square down — obstacles that he hopes to avoid in the future with an improved crypto infrastructure:
“Just from a business perspective, we don’t look like an Internet company today. An Internet company can launch something and it’s available around the world. Whereas with payments, you have to go to each market and pay attention to regulators. You need a partnership with a local bank. This is a very slow process in any new market.”
The team’s efforts to provide solutions for the crypto space will reportedly all be made open source. Dorsey says that security and currency efficiency are areas he hopes to tackle with the team, as well as potentially less prominent issues like code reviews, which Dorsey cites as a major issue for bitcoin (BTC).
The planned team will reportedly be a small group, comprised of a handful of crypto-literate software engineers and a single designer. Dorsey plans to work directly with the team. The first announced dev hire for the team was Steve Lee, a former director at Google.
Dorsey also touched on the role of including a designer, saying that better design could make the crypto space more accessible to the layperson:
“This designer will be tasked with doing educational tasks […] These will include making it easier for ordinary people to conceptualize using digital currencies like Bitcoin as an everyday tool for payment.”
As previously reported by Cointelegraph, Square recently saw a revenue high in BTC through its payment app Cash, an option made available to users in February 2018. According to its first quarter report for 2019, the company has made a net profit of about $830,000 through BTC in the quarter, with a total BTC revenue of $65.5 million.
