ARK Invest goes big on Square after Jack Dorsey’s Bitcoin announcement

Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest has thrown its weight further behind payments company Square, increasing holdings by roughly another $US54 million, following founder Jack Dorsey’s announcement of plans to set up a new Bitcoin division.

Dorsey, also the CEO of Twitter, last week tweeted that Square’s new service will be set up to facilitate non-custodial, permissionless and decentralised financial services, with a focus primarily on Bitcoin.

Square is creating a new business (joining Seller, Cash App, & Tidal) focused on building an open developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services. Our primary focus is #Bitcoin. Its name is TBD.

— jack (@jack) July 15, 2021

Both Wood and Dorsey are huge Bitcoin fans, big investors in the number one crypto, and frequently give their “two satoshis” on its longterm future with an extremely bullish bent.

At the Bitcoin Miami conference in June, Dorsey even said that if he wasn’t already tied up working on Square and Twitter, he’d be channelling his efforts into Bitcoin full time.

As reported by Decrypt today, and according to ARK’s daily holding files, Wood’s company grabbed 225,937 Square shares in a trade following Dorsey’s announcement.

ARK’s stock-buying move also comes after the news earlier this month that Square has firm plans to build a Bitcoin hardware wallet.

The goal with the wallet, according to Square’s head of product development Jesse Dorogusker, is to help bring Bitcoin custody more into the mainstream.

We have decided to build a hardware wallet and service to make bitcoin custody more mainstream. We’ll continue to ask and answer questions in the open. This community’s response to our thread about this project has been awesome – encouraging, generous, collaborative, & inspiring. https://t.co/CHf9hAmKnn

— Jesse Dorogusker (@JesseDorogusker) July 8, 2021

Like the proposed Bitcoin wallet, Square’s newly announced Bitcoin-focused service will be set up to have complete transparency, with Dorsey claiming it will be “open roadmap, open development, and open source”.

B’s the word

We’ll no doubt learn a bit more about these developments at upcoming Bitcoin conference The B Word, being held in a couple of days’ time on 21 July.

The conference’s chief aim is to “demystify and destigmatize mainstream narratives about Bitcoin”. Among others, speakers will include Wood, Dorsey, renowned Bitcoin and crypto analysts Lyn Alden and Nic Carter, and the co-founder and CEO of Blockstream, Adam Back.

If interested in virtually attending, you can register here.