JAKARTA - At a packed Miami conference last June, Jack Dorsey, mused in front of thousands of attendees about where his true passion lies: "If I wasn't on Square or Twitter, I would be working on bitcoin."
On Monday, November 29, Dorsey finally made the most of a part of it. He announced he was leaving Twitter for the second time, and handed the CEO position to a 10-year veteran at the company.
The 45-year-old entrepreneur, often described as an enigmatic person with interests ranging from meditation to yoga to fashion design, is now planning to pursue a passion that includes focusing on running Square Inc and doing more philanthropic work, according to sources. familiar with the plan, as quoted by Reuters.
Long before the shocking news emerged, Dorsey had laid the groundwork for the next chapter in his life, seeding both companies with crypto-related projects.
Underlying Dorsey's broader vision was the principle of "decentralization," or the idea that technology and finance should not be concentrated among a handful of "gatekeepers," as they are today. However, it must, and vice versa, be controlled by many people, either people or entities.
The concept has already been put into play at Square, which has set up a division devoted to working on projects and providing grants with the aim of increasing bitcoin's popularity globally.
Dorsey has been a long-time proponent of bitcoin, and the appeal is that the cryptocurrency will allow private and secure transactions with the value of bitcoin that are not tied to any government.
The idea has also underpinned new projects on Twitter, where Dorsey appointed a “senior lieutenant” and now the company’s new CEO Parag Agrawal – to oversee the team trying to build a decentralized social media protocol, which would allow different social platforms to connect. each other, similar to how email providers operate.
The project, called Bluesky, aims to allow users to control the type of content they see online, removing the "burden" on companies like Twitter to enforce global policies to combat misuse or misleading information, Dorsey said in 2019 when he announced Bluesky.
Bitcoin also stands out in its two companies. Square became one of the first publicly traded companies to have bitcoin assets on their balance sheets, having invested $220 million in cryptocurrency.
In August, Square created a new business unit called TBD to focus on bitcoin. The company also plans to build a hardware wallet for bitcoin, a bitcoin mining system, as well as a decentralized bitcoin exchange.
Twitter allows users to tip their favorite content creators with bitcoin and has been testing integration with non-fungible tokens (NFT), a type of digital asset that allows people to collect unique digital art.
Analysts see the transition as a positive signal for Square, the fintech platform he co-founded in 2009. Square's core Cash app, having seen an increase in its share in 2020, has seen slower growth in the last quarter.
He is also trying to digest the US$29 billion (Rp 415 trillion) acquisition of Buy Now Pay Later Afterpay, the biggest acquisition ever.
But this ambition will not pay off until years from now, analysts warn.
“The blockchain platform they are trying to develop is great but also fraught with technical challenges and difficult to quantify for consumers. I think he will focus more on Square, and crypto will be a part of that," said Christopher Brendler, an analyst at da Davidson.
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