Mobile Payments startup Square on Wednesday reported that its CashApp generated over $178 million in revenue from the purchase of Bitcoin in the fourth quarter of 2019, making a profit of $3 million.
This is a 20 percent increase over the Bitcoin sales of last quarter, the figure of which stood at $148 million.
The report also detailed that the CashApp in total sold $516 million in Bitcoin over last year with a year-end profit of $8 million. Compared to the Bitcoin-related numbers, the platform generated $183 million in Q4 from its other services.
As detailed in the quarterly report, Square spent $174.4 million for its Bitcoin services last quarter, with total spending of $508 million for the whole year.
For the quarter, total revenue generated by the CashApp is $361 million, while the total revenue of Square touched $1.31 billion, with a total yearly profit of $1.9 billion.
The quarterly profit generated from the Bitcoin sales is only around 2 percent less than the gross gains from subscription and transaction-based services.
Jack Dorsey - an advocate of Bitcoin
Launched as a mobile-based payment platform by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Square extended its support towards cryptocurrency trading in summer 2018 by adding the services on its peer-to-peer Cash app.
According to the company, Cash App had about 24 million monthly active customers in December, surging 60 percent from last year.
“[In] the first three months since its launch, equity investing has seen the fastest adoption of any product ever launched by Cash App. Customers are taking advantage of the ability to buy fractional shares, with the average customer buying around $20 of stock every time they make a purchase,” Square wrote in Q4’s shareholder’s letter.
The platform has consistently maintained its growth in crypto sales despite the long-reigning slow down in the digital asset market. Notably, in the third quarter of 2018, Bitcoin sales revenue from the platform stood at merely $48 million.
Dorsey was always an advocate of Bitcoin and also set up a dedicated crypto team, called Square Crypto, to make open-source contributions to the Bitcoin protocol. Earlier this month, Twitter even added a Bitcoin emoji showing its support for the digital currency.
