Block CEO Jack Dorsey said his company would support stablecoins, even though he has long argued that Bitcoin should serve as the internet’s native monetary protocol.
In an interview with WIRED, Dorsey acknowledged the change while clarifying that it reflects customer demand rather than a change in personal belief.
“I don’t like that we support stablecoins, but our customers want to use them,” he said. “I don’t think it’s wise to move from one goalkeeper to another.”
The move marks a pragmatic shift for one of Silicon Valley’s most vocal Bitcoin advocates. For years, Dorsey structured Block’s crypto strategy around Bitcoin alone, supporting the development of mining hardware and integrating the asset into products such as Cash App.
The company first introduced the ability for users to buy and sell bitcoin on the Cash App, and the company received a BitLicense from New York regulators the following year.
Block launched a Bitcoin development arm and funded Bitcoin and Lightning Network developers in 2019, and began accumulating bitcoin for its corporate treasury in 2020. It currently holds 8,888.3 BTC, worth over $600 million.
In the meantime, stablecoins have surged. Tokens linked to the Fiat currency are now widely circulating in crypto markets and cross-border payments, with their total market capitalization reaching $318 billion, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
Competition is also intensifying. Payments companies including Stripe and PayPal have already integrated stablecoin infrastructure, increasing pressure on Block to offer similar options to avoid losing users, although Dorsey did not mention them during the interview.
This is not the first time Dorsey’s Block has reluctantly endorsed stablecoins.
In November last year, Block’s Cash app announced that it was adding support for stablecoins, making them “interoperable with a customer’s USD cash balance.” Stablecoin deposits, the company said, would be instantly converted to US dollars on users’ balances.
This development was notable because in 2024, while Facebook was working on its since-discontinued Libra stablecoin and the Libra association behind it, Dorsey declared with a definitive “Hell no” that it would not join the crypto payment system.
At the time, Dorsey said in part that the project “was born out of corporate intent, and it was not consistent with what I personally believe and what I want our company to represent.”
In the manner of Bitcoin purists, he continues to argue that Bitcoin’s decentralized design makes it the best candidate for an open financial protocol.
The comments come after the company reduced its workforce by around 40%, citing structural changes driven by artificial intelligence. While the layoffs sparked controversy over whether the company had overhired, Dorsey brushed off the issue during the WIRED interview and redoubled his emphasis on AI.
“These [AI] The tools present a future that completely changes the way a business is structured,” Dorsey said in the interview, noting that the layoffs were not intended to fix the company’s costs and revenue per employee because his company was “already ahead” of all its competitors on those metrics.
“I don’t know what the end result will be, but I know it will have a dramatic effect,” Dorsey added.
