Square’s Cash App now allows almost all users to buy and sell Bitcoin, the company’s CEO announced in a tweet.
The Square Cash App, an app for sending and receiving fiat currency from the mobile payments company Square, has now made Bitcoin (BTC) trading available for almost all of its users, excluding those in New York, Georgia, Hawaii, and Wyoming.
Jack Dorsey, CEO of Square and Twitter, announced the news in a tweet Jan. 31, which also included a short cartoon entitled “My First Bitcoin”, explaining Bitcoin to industry newcomers.
Instant buying (and selling, if you don’t want to hodl) of Bitcoin is now available to most Cash App customers. We support Bitcoin because we see it as a long-term path towards greater financial access for all. This is a small step.
We also made this! https://t.co/z3u0liDNk4
— jack (@jack) January 31, 2018
Since Square operates on a Point of Sale (PoS) network, the addition of BTC to its mobile services means that in the future any merchant that uses Square’s payment system will potentially be able to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment.
While the company says they will not add additional transaction fees for buying and selling BTC on the Cash App, the app calculates the price at which you can buy and sell from the quoted mid-market price, an average across major exchanges. According to Square’s site, users will be allowed to buy up to $10,000 in BTC a week, while there is no limit for selling.
Square had previously announced in November 2017 that they would release a BTC trading option to a select 3 million customers, causing their stock to jump $1 billion in five days. Since the announcement Square’s stock had increased by more than 3 percent when it closed Wednesday, Jan. 31.
Square’s announcement comes shortly after Robinhood, another trading app, announced that it would begin allowing users to trade in Bitcoin and Ethereum without fees starting in February.
Coinbase, which charges transaction fees but has more users than brokerage firm Charles Schwab, has long been considered the most reliable exchange for crypto trading. With the addition of Robinhood and Square to the crypto trading sphere, with already more than 1 mln users on the waitlist for Robinhood’s crypto trading platform, it’s clear that the market for crypto trading applications is heading in a less centralized direction.
