Square Exceeds Profit Estimates as Bitcoin Volumes Rise

Share post:

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.

Featured Tech Jobs

SUBSCRIBE NOW

Related articles

Google’s data centers consume 5.6 billion gallons of water

Google's water consumption has soared in recent years, with the company using 5.6 billion gallons of water in...

EU, U.S. agrees on new data privacy framework

The European Commission has adopted an agreement with the United States to reopen transatlantic data flows between the...

U.S. intel agencies buying Americans’ personal dates

According to a declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), U.S. intelligence services acquired...

PostgreSQL becomes the most popular database engine 

According to a new Stack Overflow study of 90,000 engineers, PostgreSQL has surpassed MySQL as the most popular...

Become a member

New, Relevant Tech Stories. Our article selection is done by industry professionals. Our writers summarize them to give you the key takeaways