Square Inc., the financial services company founded by Jack Dorsey, is changing its corporate name to Block as a symbol of growth.
The payments company Square said on Wednesday that it was changing its name to Block, a nod to one of the main focuses of the company’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, an enthusiast for cryptocurrency and the blockchain technology it runs on.
“We built the Square brand for our Seller business, which is where it belongs,” said Dorsey, the company’s CEO. “Block is a new name, but our purpose of economic empowerment remains the same. No matter how we grow or change, we will continue to build tools to help increase access to the economy.”
The name Block encompasses many different aspects of the company’s forward-looking plans. Including “building blocks, neighborhood blocks and their local businesses, communities coming together at block parties full of music, a blockchain, a section of code, and obstacles to overcome.”
Dorsey co-founded Square in 2009 with a focus on in-person payments and its namesake card reader. Which let people accept credit card payments on a smartphone. San Francisco-based Square has since added a peer-to-peer digital banking app and small business lending. As well as received a bank charter and begun offering crypto and stock trading. The company has acquired buy-now-pay-later provider Afterpay and Jay-Z’s music streaming service Tidal. It’s also doubling down on bitcoin with a crypto-focused business called TBD.
Block says that everything else at the company will be the same, with employees engaged in everything they did previously, except with new email addresses. The new corporate website will have the address of block.xyz; the seemingly preferable block.com appears to belong to a stealth cryptocurrency firm. Currently, the company’s NYSE ticker symbol SQ will remain unchanged.
Square’s earnings for the 12 months through September were $537 million on sales of $16.7 billion, according to FactSet. Twitter lost $181 million on sales of $5 billion in the same period.
