Square Inc Reveals Plan for Crypto-Wallet hardware
U.S.-based hardware company Square Inc announced on Tuesday plans to create a hardware wallet for Bitcoin, following a U.S. senator’s warning about imposed cryptocurrency threats on consumers and financial markets.
The U.S. based financial service and digital payments company Square Inc — announced via one of its lead’s Twitter account– its plan to create a hardware wallet for cryptocurrency.
Jesse Dorogusker, the company’s hardware lead revealed the news on Thursday, stating the company’s strategy on making the Bitcoin custody more mainstream and accessible.
This Tweet came as a follow-up to U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren demanded answers from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to crypto regulations by the end of July. The senator’s goal is the protection and security of investors against the rising market for digital currencies.
Following the Governor of France’s concerns against the digital market, this comes as one of many attempts governmental personas are leading against the cryptocurrency market.
Senator Warren referred to the escalating digital market as “highly opaque and volatile,” requesting a series of information from the SEC to help the Congress in assessing the severity of the situation, while establishing if the SEC has the required authority to terminate existing gaps in regulation.
On another note, Square Inc founder Jack Dorsey, who is also the CEO of microblogging platform Twitter, teasingly announced in a tweet that Square was thinking of creating a non-custodial wallet. This came as a resulted plan after the expansion the company executed in 2018 which allows its Cash app users to buy and sell Bitcoin from Square’s Cash App.
To those not familiar with the concept, a non-custodial wallet is a decentralized kind of wallet, allowing the user to own its private keys. This will allow users to have full control over the funds receiving a file with confidential keys by writing down a mnemonic phrase.
It is crucial to acknowledge Dorsey’s role in this situation, as he is one Bitcoin’s biggest supporters, with his Twitter stating nothing but #bitcoin.
Prior to Jesse Dorogusker’s announcement, on June 4th, Dorsey announced in another separate tweet how “square is considering making a hardware wallet for #bitcoin.” To elaborate more about the company’s train-of-thought regarding this topic, he added “If we do it, we would build it entirely in the open, from software to hardware design, and in collaboration with the community. We want to kick off this thinking the right war: by sharing some of our guiding principles.”
However, Bitcoin wallets won’t be your typical approach to store currencies.
Bitcoin wallets, or non-custodial wallets, can be stored offline or online at cryptocurrency exchange, a venue where Bitcoin can be bought and sold for traditional currencies or additional virtual coins.
As Square is in the process of making bitcoin custody easier, another company is partnering with 50 cryptocurrency platforms to easy-up the procedure of converting and spending digital currencies.
Visa, the global payments technology company has already made the switch to a more digitalized payments settlements in March.
Seeing as its acceptance of digital currencies broadens, the company said its customers’ spending exceeded $1 billion on its crypto-linked cards in the first half year, as payments processes are smoother with crypto transactions.
“We are doing a lot to create an ecosystem that makes cryptocurrency more usable and more like any other currency. People are exploring ways in which they can use cryptocurrencies for things they would use normal currencies for,” Visa’s CFO Vasant Prabhu informed CNBC.
With the escalating popularity following cryptocurrency by both the public and high-profile names such as Tesla chief exec Elon Musk –who announced that customers can purchase his electrics cars with bitcoin before Bitcoin’s crash in May — non-custodial wallets and Visa crypto-linked cards are expected to reach soaring popularity amongst users in no time.