Digital payments firm Square Inc, which was cofounded and is led by former Twitter Inc chief executive officer Jack Dorsey, on Wednesday changed its corporate name to Block, as it expands into cryptocurrency and other financial technology tools.
The Square payments platform — which was the company’s sole offering when it was founded in San Francisco by Jim McKelvey and Dorsey in 2009 — would keep its name, and the now-public company would continue to trade under the symbol “SQ.”
Square started out providing small businesses with devices that plug into smartphones or computer tablets to process credit or debit card payments.
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The company has since expanded to include Cash App and rapper Jay-Z’s music streaming service Tidal.
“We built the Square brand for our Seller business, which is where it belongs,” Dorsey said in a release. “Block is a new name, but our purpose of economic empowerment remains the same.”
The corporate name change is meant as a nod to the company’s growth, and would not involve organizational restructuring, the company said.
Facebook Inc in October changed its corporate name to Meta Platforms Inc in a similar move, while Google years ago took on the corporate name Alphabet Inc.
“Not to get all meta on you ... but we’re going to!” Square said in a Twitter comment under a Dorsey tweet about the name change.
“Block references the neighborhood blocks where we find our sellers, a blockchain, block parties full of music, obstacles to overcome, a section of code, building blocks, and of course, tungsten cubes,” it said, adding that the name also represents an overarching ecosystem of businesses.
Square has announced that it is working on a wallet for holding digital money, and Dorsey recently expressed interest in the company getting involved in mining cryptocurrency.
An initiative at the company that had been called Square Crypto would change its name to Spiral.
Earlier this week, Dorsey announced that he would leave Twitter, after steering the social network during the tumult of former US president Donald Trump administration and surviving an activist investor’s ouster bid last year.
Dorsey came under pressure from Elliott Management Corp amid concerns that he had spread himself too thin by running both Twitter and Square.
Twitter chief technology officer Parag Agrawal has assumed Twitter’s top post, with Dorsey saying that he would remain a member of the board until about May next year to help with the transition.
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