Payments company Square is hiring new employees who can handle cryptocurrencies, according to a series of tweets from its founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, Wednesday night.
Dorsey, who is also the cofounder and CEO of Twitter, tweeted that Square needs a three to four crypto engineers and one designer who can work full-time on open source contributions to company's upcoming cryptocurrency ecosystem.
The Bitcoin Initiative
In the tweet, the Square CEO said hired candidates will report directly to him, and will have the option to get their salaries in bitcoins. According to a series of tweets following the announcement, this would be the first time that Square would provide efforts for an open source initiative that is independent of its own business objectives.
"These folks will focus entirely on what's best for the crypto community and individual economic empowerment, not on Square's commercial interests. All resulting work will be open and free," Dorsey pointed out.
Why Cryptocurrency? Why Now?
In the series of tweets, Dorsey stated that Square has benefited a lot from the open source community, and doing this is just a small way of giving back. However, the CEO also said that this initiative would also push the company's "broader interests," which is to develop a global financial system for the internet.
At the Consensus blockchain and cryptocurrency conference in May 2018, Dorsey said that he believes that the internet should have its own currency, and the bitcoin cryptocurrency could just be it. As a payments company, Square could be looking forward into the future and setting up for a single digital currency.
Currently, Square's Cash app is already supporting bitcoin transactions, while a previous report said the company has $166 million in annual bitcoin revenue last year.
Meanwhile, as to why Dorsey is looking for a designer, he just said the cryptocurrency platform is underfunded in this area.
According to the CEO, having a great design in the cryptocurrency platform will allow more people to gain faster and better access to this kind of technology.
