Square to build hardware wallet for Bitcoin, Jack Dorsey confirms

Digital payments company Square has decided to build a hardware wallet for Bitcoin, company CEO Jack Dorsey said on Thursday. The announcement came a little more than a month after Dorsey said Square was considering building a hardware wallet, which lets users store digital assets on a computer or smartphone.

"We're doing it #Bitcoin," Dorsey wrote in a retweet of a tweet from Jesse Dorogusker, the hardware lead at Square.

"We have decided to build a hardware wallet and service to make bitcoin custody more mainstream," Dorogusker wrote in his tweet. "We'll continue to ask and answer questions in the open. This community's response to our thread about this project has been awesome - encouraging, generous, collaborative, & inspiring."

Bitcoin wallets are used to store cryptocurrency and have a private key for security. Hardware wallets are considered among the most secure, since they store Bitcoin in a physical device that can be plugged in to a computer or phone.

Square already lets people buy and sell the digital coin via its Cash app, and Dorsey has been a vocal advocate of Bitcoin.

In June, Dorsey discussed the possibility of creating the hardware wallet, during the Bitcoin 2021 conference, saying that if the company proceeded with the idea, he wanted to "make it completely in the open, from all of our software to all of our hardware design" and that it would be open-sourced.

Timing for the hardware wallet's launch wasn't revealed, and Square representatives declined to comment.