All right, I think we can get started, everyone. Hope everyone's enjoying their lunch. My name is Tien-Tsin Huang. I'm the Payments and IT Services analyst here at J.P. Morgan. I'm super thankful and excited to get to host this guy again for a fireside chat. Jack Dorsey, co-founder, chairman, chief Block Head. Square Head?
Square Head, Block Head. Yep.
Yeah. So I think I got all that right. But before... Thank you for being here, Jack. It means a lot to me. So before we start, let me read the safe harbor. During this conversation, Jack may make forward-looking statements that are subject to certain risks and uncertainties. Please take a look at Block's most recent filings with the SEC for a discussion of the company's risk factors and for reconciliations of non-GAAP metrics to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measure. He may also speak as to certain non-GAAP metrics. Further, any discussion of Cash App's banking services refer to those offered through Cash App's bank partners. All right, so that's the safe harbor. Got the legalities out of the way.
So, Jack, maybe just to kick it off, for those that are less familiar, maybe give a quick commercial on Block, the mission statement. I know economic empowerment means a lot to you, and maybe the meaning behind the name Block. Let's start with that.
Yeah. Well, thanks again for having me. We've been doing this for what? five years, six years?
Yeah, it feels that way.
Six years in a row. We started with this very simple idea of building tools to help empower people into the economy, and that's really where our purpose comes from, economic empowerment. But the simple thing is building technology tools to give people not only a more level playing field, but to give them an advantage. And we started with very small customers, very small sellers, and we wanted to enable them to grow. And our whole principle was, if they grow, we grow, and we have this nice virtuous loop in our business. And we expanded that with Cash App, but instead of having sellers as a customer, we had individuals. Individuals who wanted to do one particular thing, which was send money to their friends or to their family.
We started with peer-to-peer in a very, very complicated market. There's only PayPal and Venmo at scale, and no one believed that we could actually build Cash App in that competitive environment. But we had the infrastructure, we had the tools, we had the technology. We had people like Brian, who's been at the company for close to 14 years, maybe 13 years, and figured out just a bunch of technologies and designs to make people want to use it in a way that made them say, "Wow, that was fast!" And that's really what we're about, is like, how do we build technologies to get people to say, "Wow!
Like, I had no idea that I could do that, and I had no idea the speed and the ease of use and how elegant it ends up being." We changed our name from Square to Block because we had Cash App. We wanted to build other ecosystems, and we went to build other ecosystems, and they all can't be represented by this seller brand. So we chose Block because it referenced a neighborhood block. It references a square, obviously. It's simple, it's straightforward, it's solid. Those are the values we want to espouse. We got into some blockchain-like things, so that works as well. And it represents, you know, the community and the neighborhood, and, like, what people try to build, in a way with our services.
A lot of people just see the name and they think, "Oh, it's Bitcoin, it's Block, it's crypto." That wasn't it at all. It's just an extended Square.
Now, thanks for going through that, because I know you put a lot of thought into it, Jack, so you hit it right on there at the end. So tell us, how has the company changed? You were on this stage a year ago with me. You put in Rule of 40. You've executed against that very, very quickly. How has the culture changed, good or bad? What's your assessment?
I think... So we'll be 16 years old in February, and I think over that time, like as a lot of companies do, they go in different phases, and we got into a phase where we made a more conscious decision to create these different business units. We created Square, we created Cash App, we're working on Tidal and TBD, and we wanted them to have their own cultures and their own way of doing things and their own way to experiment. And it really eroded away the true value of our company, is how these things come together.
When we went public, the number one question that we were asked, even when we were doing our Series A, Series B, Series C, is like, they saw Square, and they're like: You have this receipt, you know, you have the merchant relationship, but you also have a consumer relationship that you can build upon. You have both sides of the counter. There are very few companies that have that in commerce and in payments, and we actually achieved that. And that's where I think our true power is. It's not just one ecosystem, but all these ecosystems positively reinforcing one another. So how does Square impact to the positive Cash App and vice versa?
Over the past five years, we kind of just lost that strength and that vision, and we spent the past six months just looking critically at everything and redoing everything and making sure that we're bringing the company together into one ecosystem, into one team, so that we can realize this power, and we can actually create experiences that our competitors can't have. And having truly both sides of the counter and coming at it from a technology and design-first perspective, I think is what ultimately wins. But I would say, to be critical of ourselves, like, we got distracted. We lost a lot of that soul and that energy. We were in our earliest days, we were in the same breath from an engineer or designer as Google or Apple.
Like, we had that level of, of folks, and the fortunate thing is they didn't leave the company. They just went from Square to Cash App to TBD. We've managed to build something entrepreneurial, where people wanna build new things and, like, try new things and experiment, but we, we lost a lot of that experimentation energy, and we lost a lot of that, technology leadership, or the focus on it, you know? And, and that's what we're, we're trying to bring back right, right now, and, and so far, doing quite well.
Good. So I know, you know, you touched upon a lot of things there. I just wanna ask it up front, Jack, 'cause, you know, your product design has always been important to you, but ease of use and removing friction has been a big part of why I think Square, at the beginning, as I got to know the company, succeeded. So the company has this stigma that it's lax on compliance, which probably isn't fair because you're trying to keep the bad guys out, you need to make the regulators happy, but you also want to reduce friction for the users that are underserved, to your point at the beginning here. So how do you manage all that? How do you address this stigma that Block is lax on compliance?
I think it's, you know... With all these things, it's a matter of time before we achieve the success and the scale and the size that we do, and the complication that we do. Like, we have a very complicated business. Those of you who watch us and study us understand that. We have a hugely interconnected system that can, in some cases, like any other technology system, be taken advantage of. Like, every system of note, every platform will have adversaries, and it's not a question of how you keep them all out. It's a question of how you move faster and faster so that you're always ten steps ahead of them.
Mm-hmm.
If you had a perfect system, and you saw no bad activity on the network, no one would use it, right? Because you wouldn't be able to see, like, what people are trying to do next. You won't be able to innovate around that, and you won't be able to get people who have traditionally been left out of the system onto the system. We have to keep in mind, that's how we started. We were entering into a world where only 40% of merchants were actually getting through to accept credit cards.
Right.
We took that number to 99%. Not just like unleashing the gates, but changing the model. Instead of going, pushing them through a credit check, which for a lot of entrepreneurs just getting started, is just kills them, we look at the transaction, and we look at every single transaction and how they behave on the network. And that's not necessarily the right approach for every phase of the company, but it's a good way to have a mindset of, like: We need to experiment. And we're at a phase right now where that experimentation also has to come with many conversations with regulators. The regulator's job is to make sure that the playing field is truly level. Their customers' desires are aligned with ours.
Like, we wanna make sure that as many people as possible can participate in the economy and use it, and they wanna make sure that, like, no one is benefiting unjustly or doing anything that benefits an adversary. So we have to help educate regulatory bodies. We have to help bring new technologies to bear and always be ten steps ahead of the adversaries that are always going to be there. It doesn't matter if you're a payments platform, a commerce platform, a social media network, these adversarial engagements exist everywhere, and trying to design a perfect system that keeps every single thing out is absolutely impossible. It's more about that iteration speed and experimentation and how you're bringing new technology to bear.
If I look at 15 years ago, when we started with what was known back then as data science, to understand risk, which was really machine learning and deep learning, and now is moving more and more towards something we call AI, towards AGI. We have such better technology to really understand the customer, what they're trying to do, and I think it broadens our ability to serve even more people while paying attention to what is required from a regulatory and legal standpoint. That just wasn't comprehensible in the past. The scale at which we can now operate with these new tools is amazing. It's just a question of, like, do we take the mindset of integrating that into part of our business? We're just in the phase that we do that. We have to do that.
And if we wanna go to this next level, which Cash App does, of becoming the primary banking relationship for all families and households under 150,000 in the United States, that's a different level of trust, that's a different level of engagement, that's a different level of technologies to enable that, to enable us to see all the people that would benefit from that. And we wanna, you know, hold on to our roots of, like, we're fighting for the underdog, and we're helping them push themselves up, and build, like, phenomenal business. We started this company with a few sellers that started with one location or two employees, and now they have 40 locations around the world.
And we want that story not just for sellers, but also for individuals, and we now have the technology to really make that possible.
Yeah. So thinking about leveling up then, if we start with Square, when I first got to know the company, it was a simple design. You invented the market for point-of-sale software. It was a horizontal solution. It sold itself, and sellers onboarded on their own, right? Now you're at what? $200 billion, you're at scale, but there's a pretty big change. You're now vertical in terms of your product and where you're going. You're verticalizing your sales force. You're building out a sales force as well. So why is that change necessary? Is it because of tech? Is it just leveling up to serve a bigger audience? Just tell me about the thinking of why it's so different than when it started.
... I think it went different in the wrong direction, unfortunately.
Okay.
Like, I think we siloed too much, and we compartmentalized too much and verticalized a little bit too much. I think, again, we now have technology where. Well, we're. One of the biggest things we're working on at the moment, we have like, we have four apps, five apps in the App Store for Square, and our salespeople or our website has to tell them exactly which app to get, or they have to go to the App Store and search for it, and they come back with four different ones. And we're building it such that there's just one app again, one Square app, and it unfolds gracefully based on what you do with it and who you tell us you are.
And that we could not do before because we didn't have the technologies that we now have with these AI tools and the understanding of how to apply them to a customer experience. So what you'll see this year is we go from the four app reality to one, where now we can just say, "Go to the App Store, download Square," and we don't have to rely upon the App Store to be the pointer and the index. It's just one thing.
And what I'm really excited about is, like, we have amazing experiences for up-market sellers, but the very small sellers, those are still, like, some of the most important in this economy, and I think they become more and more important in this economy as AI continues to disrupt and people go to more creative endeavors. We have an app now where you can, you know, download it, and you're up and running without any hardware. You use Tap to Pay, so they have everything they need with their phone. That works all around the world. They can accept Cash App right away, and then we can start defaulting them more and more into our banking experiences-
Mm-hmm.
such as we can give them a whole bank account from just downloading that one app, and they don't have to go to a bank branch anymore. They have everything they need, including their point of sale, including the way they, they transact, including the way they do customer relationship management, all the analytics. And then on top of that, we can build AI tools to actually help co-pilot their business and give them advice on how to price things, on how to position things if they're a restaurant, on, how to hire, how to spend, where to, go to, B2B markets for, for vendor relationships. We have all this amazing data that we've barely tapped into, and, and the, the place we've tapped into it in the most is around risk and fraud.
Now, applying that towards sales analytics for sellers and also, like, what individuals do on Cash App is quite powerful. But the most powerful thing is when you see the cross counter between Cash App and Square, and how we can utilize that data to help sellers grow and help individuals get what they want and keep coming back to Cash App and seeing it not just as a peer-to-peer, but really, like, the thing I want to use every single day to transact anything, whether it's sending money to my friends or buying something online or buying a coffee around the block from me. It's all right there in this app, and it's beautiful, and it works, and it feels great.
Yeah. No, so that's a good summary of what you see. But you inserted yourself, right, to lead Square again. So tell us why the decision to lead that business, what did... What changes have you made? What can we expect from a product and what you just described to see more of in the short term?
My only focus right now across the company, like, my number one focus is, like, raising the bar of our engineering and design.
Yep.
Like, we, we need to get back to the Google level. We need to get above the OpenAI level. Like, we, we need that energy again, and we were in that conversation, and we fell out of it, but we can get back to it. It's not that we lost the people. We just kinda spread them all over the company, and we didn't give them enough where they could, like, really imagine and do something that they're extremely proud of and show off. And that is just a talent magnet. When, when you can build something that, like, is extremely challenging, it's. It doesn't feel possible, and I can show it off, both to customers, but also, like, to the world, that's how we, that's how we get the best engineers and the best designers in the world.
As I said, like, we were in the same conversation as Google and Apple, and we can get that back. That's number one. Number two is Square, and, like, we're not happy with our growth rate at all. Like, this is not the company that we started 15 years ago. This doesn't get me excited to get up out of bed. What gets me excited is, like, when we see customers, like, say, "Wow, like, this has completely dynamically changed my business. This has given me a tool that I didn't have before. I can compete with Starbucks. I'm a small, little merchant, and I could have never imagined, like, how little time it takes to actually now run my business instead of, like, having to put all these things together." Those are quite powerful.
And then the third is making sure that we really prove out this thing that we've been talking about, especially on this stage, for quite some time, which is this ecosystem of ecosystem concept. How does every ecosystem positively reinforce one another? And how do we bring the scale of Cash App to bear upon Square and vice versa, and, like, truly meet the potential that we had when we went public, when everyone was asking that question, like: "When are you going after both sides of the counter? And what does this all mean in the future?" And I think we're finally positioned to do that, and we'll see a lot of the proof points this year.
Okay. So building on that, we recently ran this checkout survey, Jack, and I was really surprised that Cash App Pay scored really high in terms of awareness and willingness to use, et cetera, even though it's still relatively early. So that speaks a lot, right, to the opportunity. But what's the vision of that and what you just described in terms of the ecosystem? Do you view Cash App Pay as maybe just the beginning of introducing commerce into Cash App and in the broader ecosystem, or is that more Afterpay with commerce? So just tell us about lacing in commerce together with Cash App Pay, and then we'll talk about Cash App.
I mean, I'll be honest, I was very surprised at it as well, that it's done so well, and Brian and I have talked about this a lot, but I was a doubter. I didn't believe that it would work because when you look at the average checkout online, like you see now 20 different buttons, and I think what wins there, what I believed wins there is speed. Like, I just wanna complete this transaction as quickly as possible. But I think it speaks to the brand power of Cash App. I think it's an extremely strong brand, maybe too strong for where we're trying to move, because people understand it as one thing, like maybe they understand it as peer-to-peer, and we need to shift it towards, like, this is my bank.
I don't need anything else. I can download this, and, like, everything I need to do, I can do from this one app, plus, plus, plus.
Mm-hmm.
So I think that's a big part of it, is this an option that may not be, in comparison, the fastest, absolute fastest way to pay, but it has a ton of weight behind it that has a lot of value that I have, and I just wanna use it again and again and again. And it fits nicely into this broader ecosystem that's now more and more inclusive of Afterpay, where we can start really seeing the effects of what Afterpay can do. And Afterpay is great when it has been merchant focused, but as it becomes more consumer driven and more consumer focused, and we take the...
Everything that we've done with the Cash App Card and use that as distribution and enable people to just put it right on the Cash App Card for any merchant, that's, that's a massive shift for our company and a massive shift in capability for individuals using Cash App and using these tools, and using these tools in general. And I, I have no doubt, like, the credit function itself, there's a ton of innovation ahead. And lending, there's a ton of innovation ahead, and they're all gonna be packaged differently. And there's gonna be different ways to consider this. And what's been interesting about our trajectory in lending is that is our amount of data that we have.
Like, if you go all the way back to Square Capital, like, the fact that we were the point of sale for the business, we understood the business type-
Mm-hmm.
We understood what they were selling, we understood their customers. We saw all their customers. We understood their competition. We understood the broader neighborhood, weather patterns, everything. And we could invite them to a loan for $5,000 if they were a barbershop, and that was just enough to add two more chairs, which could, you know, triple or double their business. And paying it back was simply having more customers. It never felt like a burden. And that's what we can do with technology. That made people feel like saying, "Wow, like, this is so—this is not a loan. This is not something that weighs me down at all. This is something that, like, it just helps my business.
It puts a little booster on it, and I'm good." And we're doing the same thing with individuals, with Cash App and Borrow and all the iterations of Afterpay to come.
All right, good. So let's talk about Cash App, and then we'll close the loop again with all of it. So just, you know, I wrote down some of the numbers. You've got 2 million out of 57 million actives doing direct deposit. So I know there's a big goal to do more direct deposit, of course, to get more money in, drive more engagement. But how do you convince the other 55 million to do direct deposit, Jack?
I think the simplest way is utility. Like, what can I do with my money? Can I do more with my money if I put it in Cash App? And, like, does it make my money more valuable? And, like, our goal is to continue to shift that share of Direct Deposit. Like, I may feel comfortable giving 10% of my paycheck every week or every two weeks to Cash App because I see... Like, I still have this understanding that it's a peer-to-peer app, and, like, I fully haven't explored the boundaries.
Mm-hmm.
But as I test more and as I play with it more, and as I, most importantly, trust it more, I put more and more, and we wanna get to 100%. So it's first, like, our base, like, how do we get them to get 100% of their paycheck into Cash App? And that's a function of trust. It's a function of utility. It's a function of, like, new capability that I can't find elsewhere. But trust is a big one, and this goes back to the, you know, one of your earlier questions is, like, we have work to do to make sure that we're earning people's trust. We have to be more reliable. We have to be more transparent.
We have to be much more dependable if they have to call us for whatever reason. Like, the customer service aspect of our business needs to feel like a product that, again, makes people say, "Wow!" I don't think it does today. It's good. It's better than a lot of banks, but it has to make people say, "Wow!" It has to fit into how they wanna work. They may not wanna pick up the phone. Like, a Gen Z customer may just wanna text and interact with more of a chat interface than actual individual. So we wanna meet people where they are. And then when we build that into the base, it becomes much easier because our growth has always been...
The majority of our growth for Square and for Cash App has been word of mouth, and Cash App has this unique advantage, and the word of mouth is actually sending money to people or asking money for people.
Yep.
And it's just like when you get money, you get an email that says like, "Brian just sent you money," you're downloading the app. So it's this amazing network effect, and the more we build on that word of mouth, like, yeah, I deposit 100% my paycheck into Cash App, and here's all the things I did with it this week, and now it's got this new feature that's telling me how to optimize my spend and my money, and I can do my taxes with it.
Mm-hmm.
But I bought stocks, and, like, I bought Bitcoin and, like, all these things, it's just like the utility is all there, and it's all in one thing. And it fits in your neighborhood as well because of the Square dynamic.
Yeah. I mean, same thing, we run surveys all the time, and some of these P2P surveys, Jack, the willingness of users to actually do direct deposit into an app away from a bank is very high, right? So the desire to do that is there. It feels like just need some more features that look like a bank, perhaps. But a question I commonly get on Cash App, and I'd love to get your views on, is can Cash App monetize differently than a bank? So, you know, bank is some transactional elements, but there's a lot of lending, as we've talked about, but is your vision on how to monetize that base different than a traditional bank?
I think what makes us different is we're willing to experiment more, and we have more features and products within that one product that we can say, like, "This is one we wanna monetize, and this is one we wanna see as an acquisition channel and give it away for free." And we can be extremely flexible and shift them dynamically. And I just don't see banks being able to do that.
Mm-hmm.
The flexibility thing is important. The ability to try something, have it fail, learn from it, try something different with a different take, and it work, and it take off, is something I just don't see from a lot of larger banks. And then it's like, you know, again, the breadth of the ecosystem. Like, we're not... We have the boundary of Cash App, but then you extend it to Square, and it becomes even more powerful. And it becomes this like, you know, potential, again, another, like, network effect for Square merchants.
These are the places I go to for dinner or the place I get my, my coffee from, the magazine store or whatever it is, like my massage therapist, golf instructor, whatever it is, it just becomes a very, very dense network that we can continue to build products upon, and we can choose deliberately to monetize how much, and where we wanna see things more as an acquisition channel to get people in the door and really build out the network.
Okay, got it. You know, 'cause we're... You're building new markets. I'm always going back to the old stuff 'cause I'm an old guy, but is it dumb for me to ask: Why doesn't Cash App have a credit card? Like, why wouldn't we see a, a credit card for Cash App? Is that too thinking back to the dinosaur ages, or is there something, you know, more forward-thinking than, than a credit card?
Well, Square has a credit card.
Mm.
I mean, it's not out of the ordinary. It's just like, again, meeting people where they are, but also, like, is there an iteration on the use case of credit? Like, what are people trying to do with a credit card, and how can we improve upon that? And if there's nothing we can bring to market that is different, we should offer that. But we think that the reason we bought Afterpay is we think it's an iteration, and we think it's a... We think it's one that makes sense for a newer generation, and we don't think it's an endpoint either. We think there's others. And I hope we all want to constantly, like, rethink and innovate around how money is lined. It's not going away.
It's just gonna be packaged differently and look differently and hopefully benefit more the individual, and make sure that, like, we're learning from all the risk factors in the past, of which there are many for credit functions or things like these newer lending vehicles.
Okay, good. We got about, what, 10, 11 minutes left. So I do wanna hit Bitcoin. Excited to talk to you about Bitcoin 'cause you wrote... For those that didn't read the shareholder letter, Jack, Jack had a, a what? four-pager around Bitcoin and the opportunity there. But for those that didn't read it, Jack, just what's the thesis around Bitcoin? Why invest in Bitcoin? Not invest in terms of, you know, personal investment, but for the company. It feels like an interesting opportunity. Tell us about it.
This one feels far out for a lot of people, and I understand that. That's why we wanted to dedicate a letter to it, 'cause we wanted something that we could point people to and answer a bunch of the questions that we always get. I think Bitcoin often gets combined with the rest of cryptocurrency, and that is not what we're focused on at all. We're not even focused on Bitcoin as much as we are: How do we build and help build an open protocol for money? How do we help build an open protocol for money movement that's not owned by one company, that's not dependent on any one government, that can actually truly be verifiable, open, transparent, and something that anyone can use and levels the playing field, not just for companies like ours, but for individuals? And Bitcoin has all those attributes.
The founder walked away. There's no single point of failure. It's a consensus driven development model, which is very complicated to get something into the system, so it's very slow and deliberate, which is what you want from, from money. In the West, we focus a lot on the number going up and down.
Mm-hmm.
But if you look at the rest of the world, they focus on how it moves money at a cost basis that is far lower than anything else. This is often in the bucket of remittances. So Bitcoin is used in dramatic ways all over South America, Central America, and all over Africa, and I think that will come more and more to Western countries. But that is the big use case that we are focused on, is how do we move money efficiently? In a way that avoids some of the issues that we've seen in the past, which is like for Square to grow, we need to have a banking relationship in every single market that we want to be in.
Mm-hmm.
The same thing is true for Cash App. If we can actually provide value on top of an open money protocol, then we can act more like an internet company. We can scale around the world. We can put an app in the App Store or a website, and we're limited only by people finding us, rather than us having a heavy relationship with a particular bank. Not that there's anything wrong with banks, but if we build new technologies to increase the flow and increase the participation, they benefit as well. We have a protocol to work with them without having to do all these contracts and paperwork. So that's the mission.
Like, as we also look at currencies, we look at the U.S. dollar versus the Chinese yuan and this competition that continues to heat up, I just can't imagine not having a third horse in the race. Like, you would want that for the U.S. dollar. You'd want that to maintain that dominance. Them going at each other alone is definitely going to kill the U.S. dollar. But if you have an alternative, and it's a technology basis that is backed up by cryptography and mathematics, that's something different. That's something we can all trust, and I think ascribes to the values of this country and what has always made the United States successful.
We want to make it more accessible, we want to make it more usable every day, and we want to make it more secure. We want it to be an open money protocol, and we realize it's not going to be for some time, but, like, if it even comes close to it, we can move so much faster as a business, and all of our peers in the space can move faster. And that just leads to more innovation, and it leads to, you know, better outcomes for individuals, better outcomes for consumers and small businesses.
Is that what TBD and this decentralized remittances is, is all about, Jack?
Yeah.
How far can we see? I know you said it's a finite amount of resources and investments there, but what can we expect in the short term?
TBD represents us disrupting ourself and specifically, like, the Cash App Bitcoin business. Like, if any developer could build the exchange and build it on and off-ramp from fiat to Bitcoin anywhere in the world, and we didn't have to do it all, we have this massive network now where the consumer only has to consider fiat and moving money from Ghana to the U.S., or U.S. to Mexico, or Ghana to Kenya, and they're only thinking about their local currency. But underneath, like, it's the lowest cost basis possible of any system out there because it's using Bitcoin as the rails. That's what TBD is. And we benefit from that because then all of our Square sellers can take advantage of that.
Right.
Larger sellers can take advantage of that for a business-to-business money movement and play. And it's just a massive market and industry that has been dominated by rent seekers and companies that just are not inspiring at all, and are quite predatory. So I think it's an underrated, undervalued part of our business right now, although mainly because we haven't launched everything that we want to launch, but I think it's a huge one. And I think the mining one is just as large as well.
Yeah, let's talk about that quickly. I know there's the mining thing. You've got the Bitkey element. You've got ASICs on the chip front. Maybe just to advertise that a little bit for people.
Yeah. So, there's basically one company that makes miners for all cryptocurrency. It's called Bitmain. They're out of China. And we, for 12 years, we've had a team that builds ASICs. These are specialized chips for a very special function. And we started interviewing mining companies and asked them what they needed and what they hated about Bitmain. And we're also one of the few companies that have access to a three-nanometer fab, which means that we can build some significant scale and chips that move very, very fast. And we're able to build a mining chip that solves pretty much all the needs of what we heard as the problems for Bitmain customers and gives them a lot of flexibility.
So reliability is a big issue, flexibility and customization is a big issue. Bitmain has, like, 70, 80, maybe even 90% of the market, and I think we're going to take the majority of that with our system. We're building a chip and a whole mining system, and I think it'll be a huge surprise to the upside, for you all in this room. So hopefully, in two years, when we're on this stage, I can prove that, but I have no doubt that we'll make a major dent in that industry. And the reason why we want to build this is because it secures the network. It's not just about mining new Bitcoin, it's about validating transactions. And if we have a secure network, we have a secure money.
A secure money is something that people trust, businesses can trust, people can trust, and we can continue to bring this ecosystem into a much, much larger scale.
No, it's fun stuff, and we'll always ask you for progress updates, I'm sure, Jack. So, you know, which leads me... Again, three minutes left. That's the one thing when I'm talking to investors, Jack, is I don't, we don't want to lose sight. I know there's a lot of focus on, on Rule of 40 and, and everything we talked about across Cash App and Square and, and connecting the ecosystems. But the one thing I always remember about following the company early on was there was always a Horizon Three. And I, I think of Cash App, at some point, was, in my mind, tell me if I'm wrong, a reincarnation or an adaptation of Square Wallet. And what we saw with that, you learned from it, you stuck with it, and now it's a huge-...
Well, you know, top 10 debit player, whatever metrics you want to assign. So, are you excited, Jack, today, with some of these Horizon Three opportunities? I would think a lot of what we just talked about, TBD and ASICs is in that, as you were five, six, seven years ago when you were starting out Cash App.
100%. And I think we'll have the Horizon Three will not be one like Cash App, but there'll be, like, two or three business units.
Right.
Some of them we have today, and some of them, like, we haven't talked about.
Sure.
Like, I believe that we have an incredibly creative entrepreneurial culture, and they just wanna be unleashed more and more. And by making these moves that we made, like, I think we get back to, like, what made us great, which is engineering and design, and pairing that in just, like, a very elegant way, and making people say, "Wow!" I keep coming back to that, but, like, it drove so much for us. And I, you know, I have no doubt that we can be one of the most valuable open companies. Not just financial companies, but open technology companies in the world because we just...
You know, we, we've learned a lot over these 16 years, and this year we're just putting all those learnings into practice and getting rid of all the sacred cows and all of our past beliefs. And now we have this amazing gift, which is these open protocols, like Bitcoin, to expand our reach, and we have this amazing gift of these new technologies like AI that we can really innovate in, not just from a financial perspective, but like truly be impactful in the AI world, with the talent we have and with some of the ideas we have. So I'll come back to you all in a you know a year or two and have proof points. That's what it's all about, but like I'm... Like I couldn't be more excited. It's amazing.
I'm glad to hear. Like, going back to basics, focusing on product engineering and what got us here, but what got you here and, you know, still focusing on the Horizon Three stuff that excites you, which is great. So maybe I always close out, Jack, asking you what you think is sort of underappreciated. We've covered a lot of stuff, but as we leave here, and what do you want people to remember or to think about here, as we go forward in the next 12 months, and hopefully have you back for an update? What should people be focusing on and tracking?
I think the role of open protocols and open source is hugely undervalued, and I think there will be a trend back towards that. And you see this in Facebook and Meta, and you see this in Microsoft a bit. And I think it will not only be a huge vector for recruiting the best talent in the world, but I think it's the only way you earn trust from your customers in the future. And I think there's just more and more skepticism and more and more fear around these big companies and big technology companies, and if you can't act more open and more transparently, and you don't demonstrate that in every single part of your business, I think you fail, and people go elsewhere.
Because the tools are coming closer and closer to the individual, such that I can run an LLM model that is competitive with ChatGPT 3.5 on my phone. I mean, that is insane. The amount of all this energy moving local and into your pocket just speaks to, like, what people are going to demand and whether they trust it or not. So, like, I think trust will be, like, the dominant attribute to maximize and optimize for, and I think the only way to do that is through open protocols and open source, and that's how we're steering our company.
Good stuff. Let's close it out. Thank you for the time, Jack.
Thank you.