Block is recalibrating crypto efforts it embarked on three years ago, Chief Financial Officer Amrita Ahuja said on a Thursday earnings call.
Block has “made some recent decisions with respect to some of our emerging initiatives” and is “winding down our TBD efforts,” Ahuja said.
TBD, according to its website, is an arm of Block’s business focused on “building open and decentralized technologies to create a truly open financial world.”
Block launched TBD as its platform for developers during a strong summer for the nascent crypto industry in 2021. CEO and founder Jack Dorsey announced its creation on Twitter — one of his other creations — noting that TBD’s primary focus would be bitcoin.
But Thursday, Ahuja said Block will redirect those investments into its bitcoin mining initiative and its self-custody wallet for bitcoin, Bitkey.
“We're focused on [making bitcoin] more accessible, making sure that more people can access bitcoin, buy, sell it, obviously, but also send it peer-to-peer,” Dorsey said on the call. “We want to make it more secure. Our manifestation of this is around … making sure that we help in every way possible to better secure the network. [Our] mining initiative is a big part of this.”
Block has over 8,300 bitcoin on its balance sheet, with a current trading value of about $630 million. That number is expected to grow: In May, the firm said it would redirect 10% of gross profits of its bitcoin products to buy more bitcoin.
The value of one bitcoin hit $90,000 for the first time ever Wednesday, soaring more than $20,000 since industry ally and former President Donald Trump emerged as the next president-elect.
Despite prior criticism of crypto, Trump pledged to support the industry — and fire Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, who is widely considered an industry foe — at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Tenn. in July.
As of 2:00 p.m., bitcoin was valued at $92,636.
Dorsey told analysts Thursday that regulatory clarity in the crypto space would be “extremely helpful.”
“[I]t allows us to move much faster because we know what the rules are and what the common understanding is, especially in the U.S. So I think [regulatory clarity] is generally a net positive for the industry,” he said.
Block’s crypto focus is solely on bitcoin, Dorsey said, because he wants the Internet to have “a native currency,” therefore allowing the firm to “move money much faster and … [offer] products in every single market instead of the market-by-market push that we have to do today.”
A Block spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment
