Square

Block’s planned H2 2025 Lightning rollout would let merchants accept bitcoin through Square hardware, extending Square beyond conventional card payments.

Who they are

Square is Block’s merchant-facing payments and commerce business, appearing in coverage as the hardware-enabled checkout platform through which Jack Dorsey’s company connects small businesses to payment services, financial products and, increasingly, bitcoin infrastructure.

The recent arc

Recent coverage has shifted from Square’s standalone growth reporting to Block’s operational reset and product strategy. In August 2024, Block reported Square profit up 15% year over year to $923 million while raising full-year guidance; by late 2025, Square Head of Product Willem Avé was discussing Block’s 2024 restructuring, AI automation, crypto and Lightning.

The most consequential current product story is Block’s plan to enable bitcoin payments on Square in H2 2025 via the Lightning Network and Square hardware. That expansion sits alongside early-2026 reporting from Wired that Block employees described falling morale amid rolling layoffs and Dorsey’s push for generative-AI tools, making execution and organizational capacity a central part of the latest coverage.

The tension

Coverage circles a tension between Square’s effort to broaden merchant payments through bitcoin, Lightning and automation and the need to preserve trust and operational discipline in a tightly contested, regulated payments market. PayPal is a recurring peer, the DOJ’s Visa case explicitly named Square and PayPal as competitors allegedly constrained by Visa, and the CFPB’s larger-participant rule places Square among major nonbank wallet and payment apps facing supervision.

Why it matters

If Square can turn its existing merchant hardware footprint into a usable Lightning acceptance channel while maintaining growth, it could make crypto payments a more concrete part of everyday seller infrastructure rather than a separate Block experiment. But the reported layoffs and culture concerns, along with regulatory scrutiny across digital payments, leave open whether the company can deliver that expansion without weakening the merchant experience that underpins the business.

Related: Block · Jack Dorsey · Bitcoin · PayPal · Square is changing its name to Block, effective December 10, and renam