Jack Dorsey leaves Twitter, rebrands Square to Block

Jack Dorsey has been a very busy man this week.  Early in the week, Dorsey left his role as Twitter’s CEO to the CTO Parag Agrawal, effective immediately. Dorsey took it a step further than do most outgoing Founder-CEOs in his decision to not to take a board seat.  Agrawal was quick to change things up, implementing a very controversial rule which limits pictures of people who have not consented to their likeness being posted on Twitter.  So far two executives have left the company as a result of the change: Twitter’s Head of Engineer and Chief Design Officer.

Twitter was in the midst of adopting blockchain innovations in a number of ways with Dorsey at the helm, including: tipping via crypto, talk of NFT validation natively on Twitter, and Twitter’s BlueSky project to decentralize the platform.  With Agrawal’s ascent to CTO and his divergence from the direction Twitter was on, all of that is up in the air once more.

Not long after announcing the move out of Twitter, Dorsey’s attention moved to his other billion dollar public company, Square.  This week, the fintech giant changed its name to Block and will be the parent company of its major holdings: Tidal, Cash App, TBD, Spiral, and Square.  Square has also been an outlet for Dorsey’s vision of a cryptocurrency-integrated future.  You can buy and sell cryptocurrencies in the Cash App, TBD is “an open developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services” focusing on Bitcoin, and Spiral is working on “building and funding open-source projects aimed at making bitcoin the planet’s preferred currency.”  Square is even making a Bitcoin hardware wallet.