Editors Note: This article comes fromethereumworldnews.com,author:Nick Chong,author:
Editor: Lu Xiaoming
, compile: tea cool
Editor: Lu Xiaoming
According to Ethereum World News, the US mobile payment company Square has announced its financial results for the fourth quarter and full year of fiscal year 2018. The report shows that Squares total net revenue in the fourth quarter was US$933 million, an increase of 51% over the same period last year; the net loss was US$28 million, compared with a net loss of US$15.7 million in the same period last year. In addition, data in its shareholder letter shows that Square sold a total of approximately $166 million worth of BTC in 2018, with a total value of approximately $52 million in BTC sold in the fourth quarter.
Square was founded in 2009, and the product was officially launched in May 2010. The founder, Jack Dorsey, also served as the CEO of Twitter. In November 2015, Square went public on the New York Stock Exchange.
Square provides mobile payment solutions for users (including merchants and users), and provides financial services based on payment. Some analysts say that its transaction method is similar to domestic Lakala.
Square’s main revenue comes from charging users 2.75% of the transaction amount as a handling fee, which is about 10 times that of domestic companies. However, the extremely high channel handling fees abroad make most of the income handed over to the bank. When it comes to protection fee - about two-thirds should be paid as an exchange fee to the issuing bank and electronic payment network institutions such as VISA and Master Card. In the face of these traditional finance, Squares bargaining power is limited.
Cash App Bitcoin Sales Trend Up For Fourth Straight Quarter
Square added bitcoin buying and selling functionality to its payments app, Cash App, in late 2017 and has been slowly expanding bitcoins functionality since then. Before the payment company obtained the cryptocurrency business license bitlicense from the New York Department of Financial Services in June 2018 and issued a secondary license in New York State, users in some states could already use Cash App to buy and sell bitcoins. coins.
Brian Grassadonia, director of Cash App, pointed out the importance of the New York state’s approval of the bitlicense, jokingly saying:
Were excited to now offer New Yorkers the Cash App, a quick and easy way to buy and sell Bitcoin. Square and the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) share a vision of making it easier for people to use The financial system, and Cash App offering customers the ability to buy and sell Bitcoin is an important step in making that happen.”
Although Square’s approach was criticized at the time, such as the payment page was unresponsive, but relying on Square’s huge user base, Cash App’s transaction volume also showed a clear upward trend.
According to Squares open letter to shareholders, in the fourth quarter of 2018, the company sold a total of $52 million worth of bitcoins (according to the bitcoin price at the time, about 13,684 bitcoins). And during 2018, when Bitcoin fell from an annual high of $17,000 to $3,150, Square sold a total of $166 million worth of Bitcoin, which is really unexpected.
Moreover, according to Square’s public data, for four consecutive quarters in 2018, Cash App’s revenue from selling bitcoins has shown a rising trend. This also reflects the continued growth in demand for cryptocurrencies among U.S. retail investors.
Although $166 million is a small number for a public companys annual revenue, people should not ignore the magnification effect of this $166 million. Cryptocurrency is a very new market. Due to various reasons such as policy regulation and immature technology development, the orders for cryptocurrency transactions are thin and the liquidity is low, so the legal currency flowing into this market often has a negative impact on the value of cryptocurrency. Magnification effect.
Next Step: Introducing Lightning Network into Cash App
Jack Dorsey said in an interview with the media this year that he is currently working with the Lightning Labs team to plan to introduce Lightning Network into Squares Cash App. The Lightning Network is a technology tailored by Bitcoin developers for Bitcoin to solve micropayments. Under this technical framework, users are allowed to send the smallest unit Satoshi in real time with zero handling fees.
Dorsey said on Twitter that the priority should be how to make Bitcoin more everyday transactions, and the integration of Lightning Network technology into Cash App aims to make it faster and easier for users to buy Bitcoin.
He said: Ive been exploring the technology with Elizabeth Stark (one of the founders of Lightning Labs) and the Lightning team...we want it to be as fast, efficient, and transactional as possible, and that includes checking out our Seller profiles and registration forms. How do you ensure the speed and efficiency that we need? A lot of what we do on the sell side is to close deals as quickly as possible.”
