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Company

Square

Filtered to Leadership & Hiring ×
168 articles rising

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.

Square has appeared in 168 articles since 2014-12. Coverage peaked in 2023Q4 with 4 articles. Frequently mentioned alongside Jack Dorsey, Twitter, PayPal, Bitcoin.

Articles
168
mentions
Velocity
+50.0%
growth rate
Acceleration
-0.500
velocity change
Sources
44
publications

Coverage Timeline

2026-02-20
Wired 2 related

Block employees describe a deteriorating culture, as morale plunges amid rolling layoffs and Jack Dorsey pushes generative AI tools to maximize productivity

Workers describe a deteriorating culture at Block, the company behind Square and Cash App, where layoffs continue and employees are expected to use AI tools daily.

2026-02-19
Wired

Workers describe a deteriorating culture at Jack Dorsey's Block as morale plunges amid rolling layoffs and a push to use AI tools to improve productivity

Workers describe a deteriorating culture at Block, the company behind Square and Cash App, where layoffs continue and employees are expected to use AI tools daily.

2026-01-31
Invest Like The Best on YouTube 6 related

Q&A with Gokul Rajaram, investor and a former product leader at Google, Meta, and others, on AI changing product development, building ad businesses, and more

Gokul Rajaram joins Patrick to discuss the seismic shift in product building driven by AI.  As a legendary operator (Google, Facebook, Square, DoorDash) and p...

2025-12-09
The Verge

Q&A with Square Head of Product Willem Avé on Block's restructuring in 2024, AI automation, investing in crypto, Lightning, working for Jack Dorsey, and more

Nilay Patel / The Verge :

2023-11-06
Wall Street Journal

As Block struggles, Jack Dorsey gets more involved, like running Square and sending his first shareholder letter in years; SQ is down 80%+ since its 2021 peak

The Square business losing Alyssa Henry as a leader is also going to hurt. … LinkedIn: Angel Au-Yeung : Weekend read: Absentee No More, Jack Dorsey Shows Up For Block's Make-Or-Break Moment  —  Dorsey...

2023-04-06
TechCrunch 46 related

MobileCoin Chief Product Officer Bob Lee, who worked on CashApp as Square's CTO and on Android at Google, dies after being stabbed in San Francisco on April 4

I worked with Bob Lee when I first started working at Google. … Jenny Lee : Last night, I heard about Bob Lee's passing.  I am completely devasted and heartbroken.  —  Bob was our Chief Product Office...

2022-02-09
Protocol

A profile of Sequoia's Roelof Botha, who seeded the idea of Sequoia Capital Fund, which holds stakes in companies past the traditional 10-year VC fund cycle

109. One billion dollars.  —  Roelof Botha used to write 109 on the corner of his notepad every week when he started at Sequoia 19 years ago. Tweets: @bizcarson , @inakib , @mfriedrichark , @sarthakgh...

2021-08-22
Protocol

Profile of Thomas Templeton, an Apple hardware veteran building a bitcoin wallet for Square, and how he photographs retail countertops to inform product design

Benjamin Pimentel / Protocol : Tweets: @protocol Tweets: @protocol : The Square executive leading Jack Dorsey's big plan for a bitcoin wallet is a veteran hardware technologist with a quirky hobby: t...

2021-08-21
Protocol

Profile of Thomas Templeton, an Apple hardware veteran building a bitcoin wallet for Square, and how he photographs retail countertops to inform product design

The Square executive leading Jack Dorsey's big plan for a bitcoin wallet is a veteran hardware technologist with a quirky hobby: taking pictures of countertops. Tweets: @protocol Tweets: @protocol : T...

2020-10-28
Wall Street Journal 1 related

Twitter and Square employees say Jack Dorsey takes hands-off management to extremes, delegating or delaying most major decisions, partly to pursue his passions

Wall Street Journal : Tweets: @bdomenech , @profgalloway , @nicoleperlroth , @iamjohnburnett , @gregbensinger , @jonyiveparody , @nancyscola , @jonyiveparody , @dgisserious , @wsj , @tomgara , @bully...

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Quarterly Coverage

Top Sources

Narrative

Square has appeared in 390 tech news articles since December 2014. The biggest stories include Square starts shipping its chip card reader with Apple Pay support; Samsung Pay now... and MobileCoin Chief Product Officer Bob Lee, who worked on CashApp as Square's CTO and on.... Frequently covered alongside Jack Dorsey, Twitter, Apple, Google, and Amazon.

Key Moments

2024Q2consumer -50pts
2024Q3enterprise -82pts; developer +9pts; consumer -14pts
2024Q4enterprise -18pts; developer -9pts; consumer +14pts

Relationships

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