Dorsey’s Block to enable Bitcoin payments for nearly 4m Square merchants by 2026
Block, Inc. has announced the launch of the long-awaited Bitcoin payments feature for merchants on Square.
The Jack Dorsey-founded company revealed the move at the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas on May 27, where the new feature was showcased at the BTC Inc. merchandise store.
The rollout is expected to begin in the second half of 2025, with full availability anticipated in 2026 for all eligible Square sellers, pending regulatory approvals.
The feature will allow merchants using Square hardware to accept Bitcoin payments via the Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s layer-2 protocol designed for faster and lower-cost micro transactions.
Customers will be able to pay by scanning a QR code, while Square’s backend handles the real-time exchange rate calculation and confirmation, enabling near-instant settlement.
Merchants can choose to receive Bitcoin directly or convert it into fiat currency automatically at the point of sale. The update builds on Square’s earlier Bitcoin Conversion tool, introduced in 2024, which gave merchants the option to allocate a portion of their daily sales to Bitcoin without manual intervention.
As of April 2025, Square reportedly serves nearly 4 million merchants, making it the leading U.S. merchant acquirer by number of sellers.
According to Miles Suter, Bitcoin Product Lead at Block, the new capability marks a major step toward fulfilling Bitcoin’s original purpose as a peer-to-peer payment system.
“Rolling out a native bitcoin experience to millions of sellers brings us one step closer to that goal,” Suter said, adding that the goal is to provide faster payments and greater revenue control for small businesses.
“We believe in an open, decentralized, fair, fast, and low-cost money system for everyone, and that’s exactly what we want to bring to Square sellers,” Suter added.
Bitcoin payments on Square mark a strategic extension of Block’s broader push to embed Bitcoin into everyday finance, complementing its self-custody wallet Bitkey, its decentralised mining venture Proto, open-source development arm Spiral, and Cash App’s growing role in retail Bitcoin adoption.
The launch of Bitcoin payments comes after earlier remarks by CEO Jack Dorsey, who in April said that Bitcoin risked becoming irrelevant if it failed to transition from a store of value to a functional payment method.
At the time, Dorsey confirmed the company was actively working on enabling Bitcoin payments through Square and Bitkey.
The launch of Bitcoin payments on Square follows a challenging period for Block. In early 2024, the company laid off approximately 1,000 employees, and in March, it cut an additional 931 jobs following weaker-than-expected earnings for Q4 2023.
