Jack Dorsey: Crypto’s Unlikely Breakthrough Entrepreneur
While he hasn’t risen to quite the dizzying heights of Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey is still the entrepreneur behind two household brands. In 2006, he was part of the team that created Twitter; just three years later, he co-founded Square. Dorsey’s recent ventures into the crypto space have flown much further under the radar.
Beneath headlines of Facebook’s troubled Libra launch (since rebranded as Diem) and Elon Musk’s biweekly Bitcoin/Dogecoin tweets, Dorsey’s companies have taken quieter, but more consequential steps into Bitcoin and other areas of decentra-tech.
Of the two companies Jack Dorsey leads as CEO, Square is the more obvious candidate to bet big on crypto. A fintech company with a vision to disrupt payment processing for small merchants is in step with Bitcoin’s efforts to democratize the economy. It’s a natural and obvious fit, so let’s start there.
It seems inevitable that they would do something in the crypto space, but most people aren’t aware that Square is already exploring this synergy.
As a publicly-traded company with a vibrant and growing established business, Square has kept its blockchain work relatively quiet. Lack of publicity notwithstanding, Square has become one of the most significant corporate supporters of the Bitcoin ecosystem through a small, extremely active team at Square Crypto. Instead of attempting, as Facebook has, to launch a private currency to simply capture and monetize financial information, Square’s approach demonstrates an understanding of Bitcoin’s potential that cuts to the core of the traditional financial ecosystem.
Square Crypto has been active for two years now, but more recent news offers even greater insight into how Jack Dorsey and Square view the potential of blockchain technology. On March 4th, Square announced their $297 million acquisition of Jay’-Z’s hi-fi streaming service Tidal. (1)
When I first read the news, I let out an audible “Huh?”. On the surface, this doesn’t make much sense. What can a payment processor focused on coffee shops and food trucks possibly do with a music streaming service? Is Square going to start adding speakers to their card terminals?
Turning to Dorsey himself, we find our answer.
For those who’ve been around blockchain for a few years now, this tweet immediately brings to mind any number of projects (mostly launched in 2017 or 2018) with the stated goal of empowering artists to better monetize their work. The vast majority of these startups quickly realized how deeply entrenched power dynamics in the music industry were and simply didn’t have the resources to remake the system.
That being said, if any (joint) venture is going to challenge the music industry and usher in an era when artists have unprecedented control over the value of their craft, it’s likely Square and Tidal, but even this is only the first half of Jack Dorsey’s quiet plan to remake the world with blockchain technology.
In December of 2019, Twitter announced the creation of Bluesky, an effort inside the company to create a decentralized social media protocol that would underpin multiple social media platforms (such as Twitter itself). The Bluesky team reports directly to Twitter’s CTO, showing the importance that Twitter’s executive team ascribes to issues of free speech and data monopolization that are born directly out of the current social media model.
Dorsey showcased his recognition of the value of blockchain and other decentralized technologies in his remarks when Twitter banned Donald Trump for his role in inciting the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
In announcing the decision, Dorsey both defended the action while expressing reservations about the precedent such action could create and how the situation highlighted how dependent public discourse is on just a few private platforms. (2)
The importance of this final observation cannot possibly be overstated. The question “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” may be an intriguing philosophical question for college students and academics, but the corollary question rises: “If someone is denied access to the public forum, is their speech still free?”
This is a challenging question and, like all challenging questions, addressing it will very likely require deep, system-level change. It will require exactly the kind of thinking that has driven the blockchain movement since before its inception. Jack Dorsey’s ability and clear desire to participate in and contribute to such conversations is just one of the reasons that he’s poised to become crypto’s next breakthrough entrepreneur.
