What Happened: Today Block (SQ), which rebranded from Square in 2021, announced the launch of Bitcoin Conversions – a new feature allowing millions of Square merchants to convert a portion of their daily sales into Bitcoin.
Here’s the gist: Companies who opt-in to the feature will be able to transfer 1-10% of their daily merchant sales to their personal Cash App account. The percentage will then be converted into bitcoin at the end of the day.
Block will take a 1% fee for every conversion made
Merchants who use the feature will have full control over their bitcoin with the ability to transfer it to other wallets or sell it at any time from their Cash App account.
Why it matters: While there may be a day in the future where transactions take place using bitcoin, today is not that day. Fiat, like USD, is still overwhelmingly the means of commerce.
But unless you are a large company working with an exchange with an institutional arm, saving some percentage of your profits in non-inflating cryptoassets is nearly impossible. Hell, even the Coinbase/Shopify integration page 404s as of today.
Block’s announcement though will allow millions of entrepreneurs to “opt-in” to bitcoin, further entrenching the asset as a means of saving for individuals as opposed to a “get rich quick” asset. The mental shift of converting profits into bitcoin, as opposed to trading in and out, shouldn’t be overlooked.
What else? In a separate announcement this week, Block announced that it is working on it’s own bitcoin mining operation and had finished the development of its own standalone three-nanometer bitcoin mining chip.
