Square Funds Designer to Make Crypto Wallets Usable by Anyone

Maggie Valentine was awarded a grant to help make bitcoin wallets less complicated for non-crypto users.

AccessTimeIconNov 1, 2020 at 9:19 p.m. UTC
Updated Sep 14, 2021 at 10:26 a.m. UTC
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Square Crypto, the cryptocurrency arm of the payments company, said in a tweet Friday it has awarded a grant to a designer who's trying to make bitcoin wallets usable by anyone, regardless of technical proficiency.

  • The work Square Crypto will be funding will seek to answer a question the grant recipient, Maggie Valentine, put forward in a proposal, namely: "How can we provide an intuitive experience for non-crypto users while preserving the security of a user’s funds?"
  • The award comes less than a month after Square, which is helmed by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, said it had purchased 4,709 bitcoins for $50 million, representing 1% of the firm's assets.
  • The grant seems to be in line with statements made by company CFO Amrita Ahuja at the time Square's investment was announced: "We believe that bitcoin has the potential to be a more ubiquitous currency in the future," Ahuja said. "For a company that is building products based on a more inclusive future, this investment is a step on that journey."
  • A more inclusive future that includes bitcoin would also seem to be a profitable one for Square. The company's Cash App has been a major revenue driver for the publicly traded fintech.

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