Jack Dorsey

Jack Dorsey co-founded Twitter and then spent the following decade turning his other company, Block, into the most committed corporate bet on Bitcoin that is not simply a treasury position. Where Michael Saylor buys the asset, Dorsey builds the industry around it: mining silicon, hardware wallets, payment rails and protocol development. He is a Bitcoin maximalist in the strict sense, holding that one chain matters and the rest is distraction.

Two Companies, One Conviction

Dorsey co-founded Twitter in 2006 and served two separate stints as its chief executive before leaving the board in 2022. He founded Square in 2009, renamed Block in 2021, and it is the vehicle through which almost all of his crypto work runs.

His interest in Bitcoin is ideological rather than speculative, and he has been unusually consistent about the reasoning. He treats it as a native currency for the internet and as sound money in the face of monetary debasement, and he has repeatedly said he sees no role for other tokens. That position separates him sharply from Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum worldview, and it is why Dorsey's companies build no smart contract infrastructure at all.

Block joined the S&P 500 in 2025, which put a Bitcoin-centric company into the index tracked by most American retirement money. That is a quieter form of adoption than any treasury announcement: millions of people now hold exposure to Dorsey's Bitcoin strategy through index funds they never chose for that reason, and Block's disclosures about mining and self-custody revenue became material to mainstream investors rather than only to crypto observers.

Cash App Is the Distribution

Cash App is the piece of the strategy that reaches ordinary people, and Dorsey has steadily pushed it from a place to buy Bitcoin toward a place to use it.

Recent changes are concrete rather than rhetorical. Cash App added automatic conversion of incoming peer-to-peer payments into Bitcoin, raised Bitcoin withdrawal limits fivefold to USD 10,000 per day and USD 25,000 per week, and removed fees and spreads entirely on purchases above USD 2,000. Block has also worked on Lightning Network integration so that transfers settle cheaply rather than paying on-chain fees, and has signalled a revival of the historic Bitcoin faucet concept as an onboarding tool.

The withdrawal limits matter more than they appear to. An application that lets you buy Bitcoin but makes it awkward to move out is a brokerage. Raising limits and removing purchase spreads pushes Cash App toward being an on-ramp to self-custody, which is a commercially unusual thing for a payments company to optimise for.

Bitkey, and the Seed Phrase Problem

Bitkey is Block's hardware wallet, and it exists to address the single biggest practical failure in Bitcoin ownership: people lose their keys.

The conventional answer to how to store crypto is a hardware wallet plus a written seed phrase, and the conventional outcome is that a meaningful share of users eventually lose the phrase, damage it, or get socially engineered out of it. Bitkey's design uses a combination of the hardware device, a mobile application and a recovery path involving trusted contacts, so that losing one factor is survivable without handing custody to a company.

The newer generation added a secure touchscreen, which removes a class of attack in which a compromised phone misrepresents what the user is actually approving. Block has put substantial resources behind this since shutting its decentralised web unit, TBD, in late 2024 to concentrate everything on mining hardware and self-custody.

Whether the recovery model is the right trade-off is genuinely debatable among Bitcoin engineers, since involving trusted contacts introduces a social attack surface that a bare seed phrase does not have. What is not debatable is that the existing model loses coins at scale, and Bitkey is a serious attempt at the problem rather than a branded reseller device.

Proto: Attacking the Mining Monopoly

The most strategically interesting part of Dorsey's Bitcoin work gets the least attention.

Bitcoin mining hardware has been dominated by Bitmain, which holds roughly 80 percent of the market. A single supplier controlling the machines that secure the network is a centralisation risk of a different kind from mining pool concentration, and it also means miners buy equipment that is obsolete and worthless within a few years.

Block completed a proprietary 3-nanometre mining chip in early 2024, signed an agreement with Core Scientific to supply high-efficiency chips at scale, and launched the Proto Rig in August 2025. The rig is modular, designed for a roughly ten-year lifespan with upgradeable components rather than the single-use design of existing machines, and Block has said it should cut miner costs by 15 to 20 percent per upgrade cycle.

This attacks both problems at once: it introduces a credible second supplier, and it changes the economics of proof of work mining by making hardware something you upgrade rather than replace. If it succeeds it matters more to Bitcoin's long-term security than any amount of corporate treasury buying, and it is directly relevant to the industry's environmental arithmetic, since longer-lived hardware reduces electronic waste per unit of hashrate.

Nostr, bitchat and the Censorship Thread

Dorsey's protocol funding follows from his Twitter experience rather than his Bitcoin views, though he connects them.

He has funded Nostr, a decentralised social protocol designed so that no operator can deplatform a user, and has spoken about the decisions he made at Twitter over content moderation as evidence that any centralised platform will eventually be pressured into censorship. He has also backed bitchat, a messaging project operating over Bluetooth mesh so that communication survives without internet infrastructure.

The consistent thread is removing operators from systems that people depend on, whether that operator is a bank, a social network or an internet service provider. It is the same argument Bitcoin makes about money, extended outward, and it is why he objects to central bank digital currencies on principle rather than on implementation detail.

What Dorsey Gets Right and Where He Is Contestable

Dorsey's record is unusual in that he spends his own company's resources on infrastructure that mostly benefits the network rather than Block's margins. Open mining silicon, a self-custody wallet that encourages taking assets off his platform, and protocol funding with no revenue model are not the choices of someone optimising a quarter.

His maximalism is the contestable part. Dismissing every non-Bitcoin development as noise means Block builds nothing for the parts of the industry where most actual usage growth has happened, including stablecoin settlement and layer-2 scaling outside Lightning. That is a defensible strategic focus and an indefensible description of reality, and it is fair to note that his conviction is also a commercial bet whose payoff depends on being right about it.

He is also a reminder that the industry's most substantive work is often the least visible. Mining chips and recovery mechanisms generate no price narrative. They determine whether the thing Satoshi Nakamoto designed still functions in twenty years, which is the question Dorsey appears to be actually working on. Among the wave of corporate entrants into crypto, that focus on unglamorous infrastructure rather than balance-sheet exposure is what makes his position hardest to dismiss and hardest to copy.