NEW YORK, Oct 16 — Square Inc Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said yesterday the fintech firm is looking to build a bitcoin mining system based on custom silicon and open source for individuals as well as businesses.
This would add to Square’s existing bitcoin-focused projects including a business to build an open developer platform, as well as a hardware wallet for the cryptocurrency.
“If we do this, we’d follow our hardware wallet model: build in the open in collaboration with the community,” Dorsey said in a tweet.
A team led by Square’s hardware lead, Jesse Dorogusker, will investigate requisites for Square to take on the project to build a bitcoin mining system.
In his Twitter thread, Dorsey also said that silicon design or chip design is too concentrated into a few companies, leading to supply constraints.
Shares of Square were up about 1 per cent in extended trading.
Yesterday, bitcoin topped US$60,000 for the first time in six months, since China’s crackdown on bitcoin trading and mining, as hopes grew that US regulators would allow a futures-based exchange-traded fund (ETF), a move likely to open the path to wider investment in digital assets. — Reuters
