Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey said his fintech company Block will use 10% of the total profits from its bitcoin products to purchase bitcoin every month.
“Going forward, we will invest 10% of our gross profits from our Bitcoin products each month into Bitcoin purchases,” Dorsey wrote in a May 2 shareholder letter that also included The Block’s forecast-beating first-quarter results.
He added: "We were one of the first public companies to include Bitcoin on our balance sheet." Block purchased $220 million worth of Bitcoin in the fourth quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021.
“Our investment in Bitcoin goes beyond the technology itself; it is an investment in a future where economic empowerment is the norm.”
Block's latest performance report shows that as of March 31, Block held 8,038 bitcoins worth $573 million, with a paper profit of $233 million in the report.
Block's total profit from Bitcoin sales by customers through its Cash App business increased nearly 60% year-over-year to $80.1 million in the first quarter of 2024. At the current price of $59,250 per Bitcoin, the program could have purchased approximately 1,350 Bitcoins.
Block's bitcoin revenue (the amount of bitcoin sold to Block's customers) in the first quarter increased 26% year-on-year to $2.73 billion, which the company said benefited from a higher average market price of bitcoin during the quarter.
In the shareholder letter, Dorsey mentioned that he spent “a lot of time studying Bitcoin” because he believed that “the world needs an open currency protocol.” He said that such an open protocol could help Blockchain by helping it “serve more people around the world faster.”
However, Dorsey added: “Less than 3% of the company’s resources are devoted to Bitcoin-related projects.”
The company launched the Bitkey bitcoin wallet in December and said last week, April 23, that it is building a “complete bitcoin mining system” to help alleviate the challenges faced by miners after the bitcoin halving, which cuts rewards by 50%.
“It’s only a matter of time before the internet will have a native currency,” Dorsey wrote. “It won’t happen overnight. Existing and emerging financial systems will operate in parallel for some time.”
