Like Facebook, Square has outgrown its original focus, dealing with payment-processing systems for sellers, and now the company is rebranding as Block, in a nod to its ambitions in the world of blockchain.
Jack Dorsey just resigned on Monday from his role as CEO of Twitter, and in his continuing role as CEO of Square, things are shifting before the year is out. As the SF Business Times reports, the fintech company is now going to be known as Block, even though its stock ticker symbol will remain SQ, for now.
Also, the Square brand isn't going away, it will just be only associated with those seller systems and card swipers.
"We built the Square brand for our Seller business, which is where it belongs," said Dorsey in a statement. "Block is a new name, but our purpose of economic empowerment remains the same. No matter how we grow or change, we will continue to build tools to help increase access to the economy."
Also, as a consequence of the change, Square Crypto will now be known as Spiral.
The name changes reflect Dorsey's continued obsession with blockchain technology and cryptocurrency, and as he said at a conference earlier this year, per the Wall Street Journal, "I don’t think there’s anything more important in my lifetime to work on."
Block is @Square, @CashApp, @spiralbtc, @TIDAL, @TBD54566975, and our foundational teams who support them. We’re here to build simple tools to increase access to the economy. https://t.co/CkVKxHPkqy pic.twitter.com/RMOnxCLP9Y
— Block (@blocks) December 1, 2021
Square's, now Block's, CashApp business lets users to buy and sell bitcoin, and the company reportedly has $220 million in bitcoin on its books.
As the Journal notes, Dorsey jumped ship from Twitter to focus on a far more valuable company — Block has a $92 billion valuation compared to Twitter’s paltry $35 billion. And while Twitter is still posting losses, Block cleared $537 million on sales of $16.7 billion for the 12 months ending in September.
Block is also now the parent company of music subscription service TIDAL, and the bitcoin financial services arm known as TBD or TBD54566975.
The change comes a little over a month after Facebook rebranded as Meta — something it continues to try to remind the world of in weird TV ads — and five years after Google became Alphabet, but we still mostly call it Google.
