Jack Dorsey on plans to hire a team of five engineers and one designer, reporting directly to him at Square, to work on contributions to the Bitcoin ecosystem
NO JERKS ALLOWED. — Square is a company best known for its disruptive card payment technology.
Context & Ripple Effects
This hiring plan is the staffing follow-through to the Square Crypto initiative Dorsey launched three months earlier, which framed Square's role as open source contributions to the bitcoin ecosystem rather than a proprietary coin or token.
What makes the structure notable is the reporting line: a six-person team answering directly to the CEO, not buried under a payments product group. The later arc of coverage — TBD's Bitcoin-centric decentralized exchange, a considered bitcoin hardware wallet, and an open source miner on custom silicon — reads as the expansion of what started here.
First-order effects
- Bitcoin ecosystem development gets founder-level sponsorship inside Square: five engineers and one designer whose roadmap runs through Jack Dorsey personally rather than through Square's card-payments business line.
- Open source bitcoin contributors gain a funded corporate patron, since the team's mandate is contributions to the ecosystem itself, not Square-branded products.
Second-order effects
- A designer hired specifically for bitcoin work signals that user experience — not just protocol engineering — becomes part of Square's open source output, which matters for consumer-facing ideas like the hardware wallet and self-custody tooling the company later floats.
- A direct-to-CEO bitcoin unit creates an organizational template that other payments executives can copy, turning 'small dedicated crypto team' from experiment into expected org design.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the six-person team becomes the seed of a distinct bitcoin business within Square — consistent with the later TBD decentralized exchange and miner efforts — meaning a payments company progressively builds a second identity around bitcoin infrastructure.
- Corporate patronage of open source bitcoin development shifts where protocol labor comes from: instead of relying only on volunteer and grant-funded maintainers, ecosystem maintenance gains recurring payroll-backed capacity, with attendant questions about influence over a supposedly neutral network.
The trend: Fintech founders are moving bitcoin from treasury speculation to staffed open source R&D, with Dorsey's direct-report team at Square as an early template that later grew into dedicated bitcoin product efforts.