Jack Dorsey

Jack Dorsey co-founded two of the defining consumer-internet companies of the 2000s and 2010s, then walked away from the second to commit fully to Bitcoin. Among Silicon Valley founders with platform-scale power, he is the one who has most consistently put institutional weight behind a single cryptocurrency, and behind a specific philosophical argument about what that cryptocurrency is for.

Origins

Dorsey grew up in St. Louis, where he became interested in dispatch software for taxis and couriers — a fascination that later shaped Twitter's real-time architecture. He attended NYU without graduating and worked on dispatch and podcast companies before co-founding Twitter in 2006 with Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass. He served as Twitter's first CEO, was pushed out in 2008, returned as executive chairman during the IPO, and then returned again as CEO in 2015 — this time while simultaneously serving as CEO of Square, the payments company he founded in 2009.

Square, Cash App, and early Bitcoin

Square launched with a simple dongle that turned a smartphone into a card terminal, then expanded into small-business lending, payroll, and the Cash App consumer product. Cash App added Bitcoin buying in 2018, making Square one of the earliest large U.S. fintech companies to sell Bitcoin to retail. Dorsey personally became increasingly vocal about Bitcoin, describing it in 2019 as the "native currency of the internet" and committing Square to contribute engineering resources to Bitcoin open-source development through a grant program called Square Crypto, later renamed Spiral.

The Twitter departure

Dorsey resigned as Twitter CEO in November 2021, handing the company to Parag Agrawal. Elon Musk's subsequent acquisition of Twitter in October 2022 divided Dorsey's legacy even further: he initially praised Musk's approach, then publicly regretted how the takeover played out. By that point he was fully focused on Square — which renamed itself Block — and on Bitcoin as a long-term strategic priority.

Block and the Bitcoin thesis

Under Dorsey, Block's Bitcoin strategy moved well beyond holding the asset on its corporate balance sheet. The company launched a Bitcoin-focused hardware wallet (Bitkey), contributed engineering work to the Lightning Network, developed open-source Bitcoin mining chips aimed at breaking the concentration of hashrate with one or two chipmakers, and integrated Lightning payments into Cash App. Dorsey positioned the entire thrust as aligned with what he calls "internet money" — a single globally accessible asset that could eventually route small-value payments without intermediaries.

Nostr and the decentralized-social push

In parallel, Dorsey became a major funder and advocate of Nostr, a decentralized social-media protocol built around signed notes and relay servers rather than a centralized platform. He contributed 14 BTC to Nostr development in 2022, promoted client applications such as Damus, and repeatedly described Twitter's original mistake as being a company rather than a protocol. Bluesky, a decentralized-social project that began inside Twitter during his tenure, took a different architectural path; Dorsey joined its board and then left, disagreeing with its governance direction.

Controversies

Dorsey has drawn criticism on several fronts. His work habits at Twitter — famously working one day at Twitter, one day at Square, on alternating schedules — frustrated investors who considered both jobs full-time. His crypto commitments are ideologically narrow: he has repeatedly said that only Bitcoin interests him as a monetary layer, dismissing most altcoin projects, which has put him in public conflict with Ethereum figures and with Elon Musk over Dogecoin. Some critics inside Bitcoin argue that Block's mining-chip and wallet initiatives are well-funded but slow to ship relative to pure-play competitors.

Where he stands in 2026

In 2026, Dorsey is still running Block, still publicly focused on Bitcoin and Nostr, and largely absent from the mainstream tech-CEO circuit. Block has continued to accumulate Bitcoin on its balance sheet, integrate Lightning deeper into Cash App, and ship open-source hardware, while navigating regulatory scrutiny around Cash App's consumer-lending and anti-money-laundering controls. His public persona is quieter than during the Twitter years: long silences, occasional long threads about Bitcoin and free speech, minimal interaction with traditional media.

The unresolved questions around him are about institutional follow-through. Dorsey has articulated perhaps the clearest founder-led vision in crypto: a single monetary asset, a decentralized social layer, and the hardware and software to support both. But Block is a publicly traded fintech with conventional revenue pressures, and Cash App's everyday business still depends far more on card-based payments than on Bitcoin-based ones. Whether Dorsey can sustain a decade-long strategic arc inside a quarterly-earnings company, or whether the Bitcoin commitments remain a side project of a payments business, will determine how seriously his vision is taken by the next generation of builders.