Cash App, the mobile application for processing Payments including Bitcoin, is now available in all 50 states of the US.
When the Bitcoin option was added to the service in January of 2018, residents of Georgia, Wyoming, and Hawaii were not approved to use that feature.
My first bitcoin and the legend of Satoshi Nakamoto
Cash App is offered by Square, a mobile payments company run by Jack Dorsey, who is also the CEO of Twitter. Square was launched in May 2010 and has a market capitalisation of $28 billion.
The application was originally launched in March 2015. In February 2018 Dorsey shared that seven million people had used the service in December 2017.
Cash App has a 4-star rating (out of 5) on Google's application website, taken from just under 35,000 users, and a 4.6-star rating on the Apple equivalent, taken from 79,000 ratings.
It began supporting Bitcoin payments in January 2018, announcing the upgrade with the help of this charming children's storybook:
Instant buying (and selling, if you don’t want to hodl) of Bitcoin is now available to most Cash App customers. We support Bitcoin because we see it as a long-term path towards greater financial access for all. This is a small step.
We also made this! https://t.co/z3u0liDNk4 — jack (@jack) January 31, 2018
When it announced the new feature, its stock rose by 22 percent.
The application's official website is very colourful, but does not have too much information. The only available text as relates to Bitcoin reads: "5PM. Direct deposit hits. Do you buy Bitcoin, or do you cash out instantly to another bank? With Cash App, you decide."
Looking at the Square website, we see that users are allowed to buy up to $10,000 worth of Bitcoin a week (1.66 BTC), but can sell as much as they like. The money is stored by Square itself rather than on their phones.
It is possible to send Bitcoin to outside wallets, which the website warns can take 24-48 hours to process, but it is not yet possible to send it to other Cash App users.
In June, Square became the ninth company to receive a New York BitLicense, which allows it to carry out cryptocurrency-related activities in the city.
Cryptocurrency on your mobile phone
Square is not the only company to open its mobile phone applications to Bitcoin. Robinhood, a Blockchain startup, quickly accumulated a waiting list of more than one million people when it launched a Bitcoin and Ethereum option on its application, and that was only for people in five US states.
Interestingly, it was reported that the mobile application of Coinbase, the US' predominant cryptocurrency exchange, fell from being the most-downloaded finance application in January 2018 to only the 40th in July 2018.
The drop in popularity was attributed to the hundreds of complaints filed against the company at the US Securities and Exchange Commission; in response, the company pledged to double its customer service teams.
