(New York) Like Facebook which recently decided to call itself Meta, the American company specializing in digital payments Square, co-founded and led by Jack Dorsey who has just left the management of Twitter, changes its name and will be called now Block.
Square has become synonymous with the system of payment solutions offered to sellers, the group said in a statement Wednesday.
However, the company has grown since its creation in 2009.
She now manages other activities such as the Cash App money transfer application or the Tidal music streaming platform. She is also working on a platform allowing developers to create decentralized finance (DeFi) projects around bitcoin, currently nicknamed TBD5 456 697.
The organization of the parent company of all these activities is not going to change but “the name change leaves room for other growth projects”, underlines the group.
The only other notable development: an initiative dedicated to the development of bitcoin and currently called Square Crypto will become Spiral.
The name change will be official on December 10, once all administrative procedures have been completed. The symbol under which the security is traded on the stock exchange, SQ, will remain the same for the time being.
The group chose Block because the term “is associated with many expressions” in English, including the construction of foundations (building blocks), blocks of buildings in a neighborhood (block parties). , or the technology on which cryptocurrency is based (blockchain).
This name change comes two days after the announcement of Jack Dorsey’s departure from Twitter, which will give him more time to devote to Block. The entrepreneur regularly expresses his great interest in blockchain-based virtual currencies.
The new baptism also occurs a few weeks after that of Meta, the name chosen by Facebook for the company overseeing the Facebook and Instagram platforms, the WhatsApp and Messenger messengers and the Oculus virtual reality headsets.