Payments specialist Square announced today that they have no plans to buy more bitcoin (BTC) for its corporate treasuries. This news comes after the Jack Dorsey led fintech lost $20 million on its $220 million investment in the cryptocurrency during the first quarter of this year.
This move comes after Elon Musk criticized bitcoin’s environmental impact and called for a move towards greener mining practices. This is something Square had recently worked on when they published a joint report with Ark Invest. This report looked into how bitcoin could be crucial in solving the clean energy problem.
Square’s CFO Amrita Ahuja told the Financial News in an interview:
“We don’t have any plans at this point to make further purchases. There’s no plans at this point to re-evaluate where we are from a treasury standpoint.”
Square’s earnings report recorded $3.5 billion in revenue. This represents more than a ten-fold increase on what it reported last year. However, the margin they make on each bitcoin transaction is low.
This news shouldn’t stutter the growing acceptance of bitcoin and cryptocurrency in the mainstream. Ahuja went on to add that Square has plenty to learn from bitcoin, and this is true of most mainstream financial services and investment corporations.
Companies such as Mastercard and Visa are also looking to learn more from bitcoin and governments across the globe open to the possibility of central bank digital currencies.
Turning to bitcoin
Launched by Twitter CEO Dorsey in 2009, Square is a San Francisco-based financial services and digital payments company. Square rose to popularity with their Square Read product, which allowed users to accept card payments by connecting to a mobile device’s audio input.
Since then, the company has grown considerably and earlier this year they joined a growing number of payment companies by embracing bitcoin.
In October of last year, they began adding bitcoin to their portfolio with $50 million investment. Since then, they added $170 million in February and today’s announcement that they would be stopping there comes on the back of Musk’s rejection of the cryptocurrency.
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