Payment services company Square Inc beat Wall Street’s expectations for quarterly profit on May. 6, 2021 as growing demand for bitcoin caused a surge in transactions using cryptocurrencies on its peer-to-peer service Cash App.
Excluding one-time costs, the payment firm, led by Twitter Inc’s Jack Dorsey earned 41 cents per share, compared with the 16 cents per share forecast by analysts.
Cash App generated $3.51 billion in bitcoin revenue, up 11 times from a year earlier, in a quarter when the most popular cryptocurrency first hit the $1 trillion mark.
Dorsey is betting on bitcoin as the Internet’s potential to have a domestic currency, which has gained in value this year as support from top companies like Tesla Inc fueled its march into the mainstream.
Square said it invested $170 million in bitcoin in February last year, increasing its stake from $50 million in the fourth quarter of 2020.
The company also benefited from the shift to digital transactions triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced people to stay at home and shop online. Gross payment volume, a measure of transactions processed on Square’s platform, rose 29% to $33.1 billion in the first quarter.
Total net revenue quadrupled to $5.06 billion.
For more information, read the original story in Reuters.
