



Square, a financial services company co-founded by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, recently released a report detailing how the company performed in Q4 of 2018.





2018 marks the first full year that the company facilitated Bitcoin trading on its Cash App product. It added support for Bitcoin trading back in January 2018. One way to quantify the findings of this report is to compare the company’s trading activity to how much new Bitcoin is being mined each quarter.

Square’s Bitcoin revenue exceeded $52 million in Q4





In 2018, Square earned more in revenue from its Bitcoin sales each quarter. The company says its Bitcoin revenue in 2018 exceeded $166 million USD over the course of the entire year. This is broken up into $71 million in revenue in the first half of the year, and over $95 million in the second.





While Square is not necessarily purchasing new Bitcoin, looking at the amount it traded last quarter and the amount of Bitcoin mined in Q4 2018 makes for an interesting comparison.





Since Bitcoin was designed to have a maximum supply cap, there will only ever be slightly less than 21 million units of the digital asset in existence. In order to maintain this fixed supply, the amount of new Bitcoin discovered slows down over time. There is currently around 12.5 BTC in each block, and 144 new blocks discovered each day.





For a rough estimate, we can assume that around 162,000 Bitcoin was discovered in Q4. This is calculated by multiplying the amount of Bitcoin per block by the amount of new blocks discovered each day. This figure can then be multiplied by 90 days in order to reflect roughly one quarter (12.5*144*90).





As The Block calculated, the $166 million that Square sold in Q4 equals roughly 10,025 BTC. This means that the amount of Bitcoin that Square traded last quarter is equivalent to roughly 6.2% of all new Bitcoin discovered during that three-month period.





While not a perfect calculation, this does present a quantifier for just how much Bitcoin Jack Dorsey’s company is selling to its customers. Dorsey has long been regarded as a proponent of the cryptocurrency industry, an asset he both holds and hopes will become a native currency for the internet.







