Block CEO Jack Dorsey said the company supports stablecoins, despite having long advocated that Bitcoin should serve as the internet’s native money protocol.
In an interview with WIRED, Dorsey acknowledged the change, although he made it clear that it reflects customer demand rather than a change in personal beliefs.
“We don’t like that our customers want to use stablecoins when we’re going to support them,” he said. “I don’t think it’s wise to keep one gatekeeper from another to another.”
The move marks a real shift for one of Silicon Valley’s most vocal Bitcoin supporters. For years, Dorsey built Block’s cryptographic strategy solely around Bitcoin, helped develop mining hardware, and integrated the asset into products such as Cash App.
The company first introduced the option for users to buy and sell Bitcoin on Cash App and received a BitLicense from New York regulators the following year.
Block started a Bitcoin development division in 2019 to fund Bitcoin and Lightning Network developers, and began accumulating Bitcoin in his corporate treasury in 2020. It currently holds 8,888.3 BTC worth over $600 million.
Stablecoins have soared during this time. Fiat-pegged tokens are now widely circulated in cryptocurrency markets and cross-border payments, with a total market capitalization of $318 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Competition is also fierce. Payment companies such as Stripe and PayPal have already integrated stablecoin infrastructure, increasing pressure on blocks to offer similar options to avoid losing users, but Dorsey did not discuss these during the interview.
This is not the first time Dorsey’s Block has reluctantly supported stablecoins.
Last November, Block’s Cash app announced it was adding support for stablecoins, making them “interoperable with customers’ USD cash balances.” According to the company, stablecoin deposits will be instantly converted into US dollars in the user’s balance.
This development is noteworthy going back to 2024. At the time, Facebook was working on the now-defunct Libra stablecoin and the Libra Association behind it, but Dorsey said “absolutely no” that he would not participate in any crypto payment scheme.
At the time, Dorsey noted that the project was “born out of corporate intent and does not align with what I personally believe or what I want the company to stand for.”
As a true Bitcoin purist, he continues to argue that Bitcoin’s decentralized design is the best candidate for an open financial protocol.
The comments came after the company cut its workforce by about 40%, citing structural changes driven by artificial intelligence. The layoffs sparked controversy over whether the company was overhiring, but Dorsey dismissed the question in an interview with WIRED and doubled down on the AI perspective.
“These (AI) tools present a future that completely changes the structure of the company,” Dorsey said in an interview, noting that the layoffs aren’t about fixing the company’s per-employee costs or revenue. Because his company was “already ahead” of its competitors on these metrics.
“We don’t know what the end result will be, but we do know that it will have a dramatic effect,” Dorsey added.