Square announces it will build a hardware wallet for bitcoin, after Jack Dorsey had discussed the possibility of creating one in June
CEO Jack Dorsey said the company was considering one in June — Square is going to make a hardware wallet for bitcoin, the company's hardware lead, Jesse Dorogusker, announced on Thursday.
Context & Ripple Effects
Square has turned Dorsey’s June exploration of a bitcoin hardware wallet into a stated build plan. It extends the company’s earlier open-source Bitcoin ecosystem initiative from software contributions toward a consumer-facing custody product.
First-order effects
- Square now has a committed bitcoin hardware-wallet project, with hardware lead Jesse Dorogusker publicly attached to the announcement.
- The move gives Square a direct role in how its bitcoin-focused customers could hold assets outside a purely software-based service.
Second-order effects
- Square’s wallet effort creates a product bridge to the company’s later Bitcoin-centric decentralized-exchange project, where users need a way to control assets while accessing decentralized services.
- Wallet makers serving bitcoin users face a better-resourced entrant whose broader Bitcoin work spans open-source development as well as hardware.
Third-order effects
- If Square carries the wallet, exchange, and proposed mining work forward together, its Bitcoin strategy shifts from supporting individual products to covering more of the infrastructure stack.
- The pattern points to custody becoming a strategic permission layer: control of the wallet can shape which Bitcoin services a company can connect users to.
The trend: Square is assembling a more vertically integrated Bitcoin product stack, with the wallet serving as the user-controlled entry point.