It’s official: Square is working on creating its own hardware wallet for bitcoin.
We’re doing it #Bitcoin https://t.co/IwbKuBoXGv
— jack (@jack) July 8, 2021
Square is the financial company co-founded by Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, and has long been involved in the technological development of Bitcoin.
Dorsey himself retweeted a tweet by Jesse Dorogusker announcing that Square has decided to create its own hardware wallet and service to make bitcoin storage more mainstream.
To date, many people do not store their BTC in proprietary wallets (of which they exclusively own the private keys or seeds), but leave them on third-party wallets, such as those of exchanges.
The thing is that holding personal private keys or seeds is not risk-free, and many people prefer to delegate these risks to a third party they trust.
However, Bitcoin was born to be trustless, i.e. to give its users the option of not having to rely on anyone else, so in theory proprietary wallets are more suited to the initial spirit with which Bitcoin was born.
In order to convince more people not to trust third parties with the safekeeping of their BTC, we need custodial devices that are easier to use, hence more “mainstream” as Dorogusker puts it.
Some time ago Dorsey also suggested a “hybrid” solution for bitcoin self-custody, calling it “assisted self-custody”.
3/Custody doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. We can probably simplify custody through “assisted self-custody.” Assisted requires great product design: minimal setup time, relying on existing devices, and end-to-end reliability. How should we be thinking about assisted solutions?
— jack (@jack) June 4, 2021
It would therefore be a solution in some ways similar to the one already adopted by other software wallets, allowing users to have full exclusive possession of their bitcoin, but to be able to rely on a service to recover their private keys, or seed, in case of loss.
Square’s involvement with Bitcoin
Square is a large financial company with nearly $10 billion in revenues and about 5,500 employees, and has long been engaged in developing technological solutions to be integrated within its app to facilitate the use of bitcoin.
In other words, it is the perfect entity to try to develop a new hardware wallet that is easy for everyone to use, but at the same time secure and functional.
Moreover, the support of the co-founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey, for this project makes it even more interesting, given the visibility Dorsey has online. Not only is he the founder of Twitter, but he also has over 5.5 million followers. For example, Michael Saylor has 1.3 million, and Anthony Pompliano 1 million. Even John McAfee had only 1.1 million.
Dorsey has also clearly shown that he is very knowledgeable on the subject, even under the most exquisitely technical aspects, so it seems that he, together with Square’s development team, may be able to manufacture and market a new solution capable of solving the main problems related to self-custody.
If we also add the fact that Square has been working on the Lightning Network for some time, the picture that emerges shows clear potential.
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