Yesterday, July 8, 2021, the head of hardware at Square, Jesse Dorogusker, announced the company would be developing a hardware wallet for bitcoin. A hardware wallet is responsible for storing the public and/or private keys associated with cryptocurrency transactions.
Company CEO, Jack Dorsey, mirrored Dorogusker’s enthusiasm in a series of tweets stating the company would develop a GitHub repository and dedicated Twitter account for the project.
The announcement to develop and launch a hardware wallet comes only a month after Dorsey mentioned his consideration for the effort last month in a 12-tweet series on June 4th.
In the thread, Dorsey stated Square would develop the wallet in collaboration with the crypto and Square community. In addition, the CEO went into more detail about custodial principles of crypto wallets stating he wanted to ensure all coin holders truly own their shares instead of lending custody to an online wallet provider.
Though the announcement for the hardware wallet was made, no solidified details were released on Thursday. However, Dorogusker did outline a general plan for the effort: the wallets would be optimized for the mobile user, and they will be non-custodial—meaning wallet holders will have sole ownership and control over the wallet keys and the associated crypto.
The renowned payments company has previously developed products relating to crypto. In 2018, Square’s peer-to-peer (P2P) payments application Cash App launched an interface allowing its users to purchase fractional shares of Bitcoin. Since then, Cash App’s Bitcoin revenue had grown to over $1.63 billion in Q3 of 2020, according to Bitcoin.com. By January of 2021, over 1 million users had purchased Bitcoin through the Cash App interface.
Jack Dorsey hasn’t been shy about his opinions on crypto; his Twitter bio touts #bitcoin. As an innovator and pioneer of Silicon Valley, his hardware wallet initiative is set up for success. In other words: if he can’t make it happen, who can? In the meantime, all we can do is keep an eye on Twitter and GitHub to stay up to date with this project.