Financial payments start-up Square Inc was on Friday at work on a real-world wallet for safely pocketing cryptocurrency.
Square founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, who is also the top executive at Twitter Inc, last month on Twitter asked for feedback on the notion.
“This community’s response to our thread about this project has been awesome — encouraging, generous, collaborative and inspiring,” Jesse Dorogusker, a member of Square’s hardware team, wrote on Twitter on Thursday.
Photo: Reuters
“We have decided to build a hardware wallet and service to make bitcoin custody more mainstream,” he said.
Dorsey endorsed Dorogusker’s post, tweeting: “We’re doing it #bitcoin.”
Hardware wallets can be used to store digital currency offline, synchronizing with applications for transactions on the Internet as needed.
Another option for cryptocurrency owners is to use “virtual” wallets, essentially trusting third parties to keep money safe and using passwords to access funds.
Dorsey on Twitter said that bitcoin is a currency for the masses, and that it is important to have ways for people to hold it that do not involve entrusting it to outside parties.
“The exchange you used to buy your bitcoin probably attends to your security with good intent, but circumstances may reveal ‘custody’ actually means ‘IOU,’” Dorsey wrote on Twitter last month, referring to a shorthand for “I owe you.”
“Deciding to take custody, and security, of your bitcoin is complicated,” he added.
Dorsey envisioned a bitcoin wallet that makes it easy for people to use some of it for shopping, for example through smartphones, while protecting the rest of the cryptocurrency.
“We can imagine apps that work without Square and maybe also without permission from Apple and Google,” he said, referring to the makers of the world’s two most widely used smartphone operating systems.
Square would set up accounts on Twitter and software developer community Web site GitHub dedicated to the bitcoin wallet project, Dorsey said.
In related news, a 101.38 carat diamond was sold at Sotheby’s for HK$95.1 million (US$12.3 million) in cryptocurrency, becoming the most expensive piece of jewelry sold through such type of payment, the auction house said.
The pear-shaped diamond, named “The Key 10138,” was on Friday sold to an unidentified private collector, Sotheby’s said in a statement.
The gem from Diacore Co was the second-largest pear-shaped diamond ever to be sold publicly, it said.
Prior to the sale, the international auction house said it would take bitcoin or ether as payment for the diamond, which fetched less than the estimate of as much as US$15 million in the single-lot offering in Hong Kong.
The auction was livestreamed and attracted no more than a dozen bids.
Earlier last week, Sotheby’s said it was the most expensive physical object ever publicly offered for purchase with cryptocurrency.
Auction houses are increasingly accepting cryptocurrencies for payment, with Phillips last month offering a piece from street artist Banksy for ether or bitcoin.
Christie’s in March accepted payment in ether for the record US$69.3 million sale of Beeple’s Everydays: the First 5,000 Days.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
TRADE WAR: Tariffs should also apply to any goods that pass through the new Beijing-funded port in Chancay, Peru, an adviser to US president-elect Donald Trump said A veteran adviser to US president-elect Donald Trump is proposing that the 60 percent tariffs that Trump vowed to impose on Chinese goods also apply to goods from any country that pass through a new port that Beijing has built in Peru. The duties should apply to goods from China or countries in South America that pass through the new deep-water port Chancay, a town 60km north of Lima, said Mauricio Claver-Carone, an adviser to the Trump transition team who served as senior director for the western hemisphere on the White House National Security Council in his first administration. “Any product going
TECH SECURITY: The deal assures that ‘some of the most sought-after technology on the planet’ returns to the US, US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said The administration of US President Joe Biden finalized its CHIPS Act incentive awards for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), marking a major milestone for a program meant to bring semiconductor production back to US soil. TSMC would get US$6.6 billion in grants as part of the contract, the US Department of Commerce said in a statement yesterday. Though the amount was disclosed earlier this year as part of a preliminary agreement, the deal is now legally binding — making it the first major CHIPS Act award to reach this stage. The chipmaker, which is also taking up to US$5 billion
High above the sparkling surface of the Athens coastline, the cranes for building the 50-floor luxury tower centerpiece of Greece’s future “smart city” look out over the Saronic Gulf. At their feet, construction machinery stirs up dust. Its backers say the 8 billion euro (US$8.43 billion) project financed by private funds is a symbol of Greece’s renaissance after the years of financial stagnation that saw investors flee the country. However, critics see it more as a future “ghetto for the rich.” It is hard to imagine that 10km from the Acropolis, a new city “three times the size of Monaco”
STRUGGLING BUSINESS: South Korea’s biggest company and semiconductor manufacturer’s buyback fuels concerns that it could be missing out on the AI boom Samsung Electronics Co plans to buy back about 10 trillion won (US$7.2 billion) of its own stock over the next year, putting in motion one of the larger shareholder return programs in its history. South Korea’s biggest company would repurchase the stock in stages over the coming 12 months, it said in a regulatory filing on Friday. As a first step, it would buy back about 3 trillion won of paper starting today up until February next year, all of which it would cancel. The board would deliberate on how best to effect the remaining 7 trillion won of buybacks. The move
RSS