San Francisco-based payments solutions company Square announced on Monday (13 August 2018) that users of its “Cash App” can now finally buy/sell Bitcoin in all 50 U.S. states.

Here is how the Cash App team announced the news on Twitter:

Red, white, and bitcoin. Now you can use Cash App to buy bitcoin in all 50 states. pic.twitter.com/D4fhVRz7WL — Cash App (@CashApp) August 13, 2018

Four years after the launch of Venmo, PayPal’s peer-to-peer (P2P) mobile payment solution, Square (whose founder and CEO is Jack Dorsey) launched a competitor called “Square Cash”, a beautiful, simple, and fun-to-use app, which got renamed to “Cash App” several months ago.

The Cash App started supporting buying and selling of Bitcoin (BTC) in mid November 2017 in a very limited rollout; the feature was officially launched in late January 2018.

Here is a tweet from Dorsey (who is a huge believer in Bitcoin) announcing the news on 31 January 2018:

Instant buying (and selling, if you don’t want to hodl) of Bitcoin is now available to most Cash App customers. We support Bitcoin because we see it as a long-term path towards greater financial access for all. This is a small step. We also made this! https://t.co/z3u0liDNk4 — jack (@jack) January 31, 2018

The reason that Dorsey said “available to most Cash App customers” is because initially Square did not have the necessary licenses to provide this service in the following four states: New York, Georgia, Wyoming, and Hawaii.

On the same day, Credit Suisse analyst Paul Condra said in an email to CNBC:

“We believe bitcoin and other crypto sales represent a potential mid/long term growth opportunity for Square and we are positive on the strategy. This strategy could also drive greater adoption of Square Cash and we note SQ is well positioned to potentially facilitate crypto-payment purchases at Square merchants at some point in the future.”

Then, in June 2018, Square became the ninth company to receive a BitLicense from New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS), which allowed Dorsey to send out the following tweet:

Buy and sell bitcoin right in Cash App…now in New York! https://t.co/sIvlVoSXun — jack (@jack) June 18, 2018

Brian Grassadonia, Head of Cash App, said at the time:

“We are thrilled to now provide New Yorkers with Cash App’s quick and simple way to buy and sell bitcoin. Square and the New York State DFS share a vision of empowering people with greater access to the financial system and today’s news is an important step in realizing that goal.”

Today, based on data from Nomura Instinet and SensorTower, cumculative downloads of Cash App surpassed those of PayPal’s Venmo for the first time ever (33.5 million vs. 32.9 million), after Cash App gew three times faster than Venmo in July.

According to Bloomberg, on 16 May 2018, Dorsey, who is also the CEO of Twitter, shared his belief in Bitcoin with a crowd of crypto enthusiasts at the Consensus 2018 conference in New York:

“The internet deserves a native currency; it will have a native currency. I don’t know if it’ll be Bitcoin or not,” he said, but “I hope it will be.”

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