Silicon Valley payments power Square released its Q1 2019 shareholder report this week and accordingly revealed that its bitcoin revenues saw a tangible boon since the previous quarter.
Square first launched a bitcoin buys and sells beta in the fall of 2017 via the company’s Cash app before it opened up the service to the vast majority of its users in early 2018. Since then, the app’s proven increasingly popular with Bitcoiners and has seen its bitcoin revenues consistently growing in kind.
Per the Q1 report, Square generated $65.5 million USD worth of bitcoin revenue in the first three months of 2019 — an increase of 25 percent from the company’s $52.4 million in bitcoin revenue in Q4 2018.
Likewise, Square’s Q1 bitcoin costs tallied up to $64.7 million, meaning the company raked in north of $830,000 in profit in BTC profits on the quarter — an increase of approximately 80 percent from the prior quarter’s $490,000 profit margin.
Worth noting that these are all retail customers too.
No single person made up more than 0.2% of Q1 2019 Bitcoin purchases.
Square limits all customers to $10k of Bitcoin per week.
— Kevin Rooke (@kerooke) May 1, 2019
That growth shows the start of 2019 has been clearly promising for Square’s bitcoin operations. In all of last year, the rising financial services titan accrued $166 million in BTC revenues, so the company has already produced nearly 40 percent of that sum in Q1 2019.
Notably, due to the Cash app’s $10,000-per-week bitcoin purchases limit, retail crypto investors have been the one’s driving the acute growth.
“No single person made up more than 0.2% of Q1 2019 bitcoin purchases,” tech commentator Kevin Rooke noted on Twitter.
If BTC sales on Square Cash maintain current growth rates, then by the next Bitcoin halving (May 2020), roughly 2 BTC will be purchased on Square Cash for every new BTC that is mined. pic.twitter.com/GPxXhaGK15
— Yassine Elmandjra (@yassineARK) May 1, 2019
In the wake of the report’s release, ARK Invest crypto analyst Yassine Elmandjra also highlighted that if the Cash app’s bitcoin sales continue on their current trajectory, “roughly 2 BTC will be purchased [via Square] for every new BTC that is mined.”
Not a bad position to be in for an enterprise that started seriously embracing bitcoin commerce just last year. Yet Square’s bitcoin revenue still pales in comparison to the fiat side of the company’s operations, which netted more than $650 million in this year’s first quarter.
Square CEO Jack Dorsey Has Established Himself as Pro-Crypto
As the CEO of both Twitter and Square, Jack Dorsey has considerable social and financial capital. In recent months, he’s become a darling of the cryptoverse for his increasingly direct overtures to bitcoin.
Dorsey first made a stir in the space last spring when he declared to The Times his belief that bitcoin was the currency of the future:
“The world ultimately will have a single currency, the internet will have a single currency. I personally believe that it will be bitcoin. [It’d take] probably over ten years, but it could go faster […] It’s slow and it’s costly, but as more and more people have it, those things go away. There are newer technologies that build off of blockchain and make it more approachable.”
During that same period, Dorsey notably contributed to a seed funding round for Lightning Labs — the outfit headed up by Elizabeth Stark that’s developing the Lightning Network, the proposed second-layer scaling solution for Bitcoin.
Earlier this year, Dorsey even participated in the “Lightning Torch” campaign, wherein Lightning users sent a relay-like bitcoin invoice all around the world. The Twitter CEO sent the figurative torch to Lightning Labs’s Stark.
Cool example of #BitcoinTwitter experimenting on the Lightning Network.
????
⚡️Torch received, now passing along to @starkness! #LNtrustchain https://t.co/YVMAv62fCN— jack (@jack) February 5, 2019
Back in February, Dorsey also evangelized bitcoin on Joe Rogan’s extremely popular free podcast series, The Joe Rogan Experience, where he hailed BTC as the native currency of the internet.
The Twitter and Square maestro also made waves in March when he announced the creation of Square Crypto, a new crypto arm of the payments company that will be focused on developing free open-source resources for the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
“Work from anywhere, report directly to me, and we can even pay you in bitcoin,” Dorsey said.
