Cash App has announced the integration of Bitkey, the non-custodial Bitcoin wallet created by Jack Dorsey, former CEO of Twitter.
Jack Dorsey is the celebrated co-founder of Twitter. He was also its CEO for a long time until the arrival of Elon Musk.
Dorsey has been out of Twitter for a while now, and is now devoting himself to development on Bitcoin.
It is worth noting that in addition to Twitter he also co-founded Block, which is the company behind Cash App.
Summary
The new Bitcoin wallet of the former Twitter CEO on Cash App
Cash App is an app created in 2013 by Square, and launched on the market under the name Square App.
Square is a financial company that is primarily focused on payments, co-founded in 2009 by Jack Dorsey.
When Dorsey left Twitter to devote himself to development on Bitcoin in late 2021, Square was renamed Block, and it is now his de facto core business, of which he is president and CEO.
Square App, on the other hand, was renamed Cash App years earlier, and as early as 2018 began offering Bitcoin buying and selling services.
Cash App is an app for payments and particularly for money transfers, and the related company Cash App Investing LLC, wholly owned by Block Inc. is registered with both FINRA and SIPC.
Block’s history
Block is a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq with the ticker SQ.
It landed on the stock exchange in 2015, which was a few years after it launched Cash App, and had its heyday on the Nasdaq between 2020 and 2021, like so many other stocks.
During that resounding bull run, its stock price went from $80 to nearly $290 in less than a year and a half.
However, with the bear-market of 2022, the price fell as low as $50, then recovered somewhat in 2023.
It now hovers around $66, still lower than the pre-pandemic February 2020 figure, but much higher than the initial $11 in 2015.
The Bitcoin wallet Bitkey
Bitkey, on the other hand, is the non-custodial Bitcoin wallet also created by Block.
Its goal is to enable hundreds of millions of people to use a non-custodial wallet without any particular difficulty or problem.
Indeed although non-custodial wallets are by far more recommended than those that instead force users to leave their funds in the custody of a third party, they are still not particularly easy to use.
It is no accident that most Bitcoin and cryptocurrency holders insist on using custodial wallets, simply because they are significantly easier to use.
But Bitkey also has another explicit goal: to connect the world of today’s centralized national or regional fiat money systems, and the distributed, borderless financial system of Bitcoin.
In particular, Cash App actually belongs to the first world, that of centralized fiat money systems, even though it integrates Bitcoin buying and selling services.
Thus, the integration of Bitkey into Cash App serves precisely to enable the connection between Bitcoin’s distributed financial system and that of centralized fiat money systems.
Furthermore, the official press release reveals that in addition to Cash App, Bitkey will also be connected to Coinbase.
By partnering with Coinbase and Cash App, Bitkey users will be able to transfer and purchase Bitcoin through those platforms with a transparent and integrated experience, simplifying the path to self-custody.
To encourage the choice of self-custody, the Bitcoin purchase and transfer functionality of the partners will be integrated into the Bitkey app.
In other words, users will only use the non-custodial wallet interface, through which they can also use the fiat currency services of Coinbase and Cash App.
