Block (Square)
More info
- Creator
- Jack Dorsey, Jim McKelvey
- Released
- 2009–
- Type
- Payments and financial technology
The payments company that started as a white card reader in a phone's headphone jack and ended up as a bitcoin venture with a cash register attached.
Jim McKelvey, a glass artist in St. Louis, lost a sale because he couldn't take a credit card. He and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey started Square in 2009, and in 2010 came the little square dongle that plugged into the headphone jack and read the magstripe as an audio signal. Market stalls and food trucks could suddenly take cards without a merchant account or a rented terminal, paying a flat percentage per swipe instead.
The company went public in 2015. Square Cash, later Cash App, became the second pillar and a direct rival to PayPal's Venmo. In December 2021 the group renamed itself Block, a nod to the blockchain: Dorsey had left Twitter to go all in on bitcoin, complete with an in-house hardware wallet and mining chips. Somewhere along the way it also picked up the music service TIDAL and buy-now-pay-later firm Afterpay.