would anyone be interested in a Square Bitcoin AMA?
reply or just tag me in any questions going forward and I’ll answer whenever I’m on
Discussion
How does it work? How is merchant onboarded to this?
For payments specifically? That’ll be generally available on Nov. 10 but here’s what to expect:
Go into Payment Settings in the Square app and you’ll see a new row for Bitcoin with an Activate button next to it.
We do a bunch of eligibility checks so activation will be quicker for some than others (depending on your business structure, geolocation, 2FA status, etc)
But everyone will have the option to choose USD or bitcoin settlement, and another surprise feature we’ll have at launch 👀
We’re looking into ways to auto-on bitcoin payments with USD settlement but as you can imagine it’s challenging from a legal and regulatory perspective.
Separately you can enable payments from Bitcoin onboarding (in Square Banking) where you can also configure your card sale conversions and set up your wallet.
So the reason to not have Bitcoin payments enabled by default was regulatory? I thought it was because Square would like to know first how many merchants would enable the feature on their own, so they could choose BTC settlement, if they wanted. So after some months, the option to accept Bitcoin payments would be enabled by default to all other merchants using USD settlement.
That’s secondary to it. I won’t bore you with the details but because bitcoin is so regulated (with nuances at the state level in some cases), auto-on even as USD is extremely tricky.
We’re working to unlock this as much as possible but it requires taking a very methodical approach that focuses on specific segments at a time.
Ah ok. I thought for USD settlement, the auto-on would be ok, just needing to approve a new Terms of Service for example. But thanks for the answer.
If I could give a suggestion:
Please add on https://squareup.com/bitcoin the information of how many % of merchants are accepting Bitcoin Payments in real time, so users could follow the metric.
Good suggestion. We can look into this but probably should wait until/if it becomes a meaningful amount 😅
Exciting stuff! Wonder if this will launch with support for Bolt12?
Definitely at some point
Will it ever be available in NY?
Never say never 🥹
Would be amazing! I know NY is a pain in the ass for anything crypto related. Coinbase is basically the only CEX we can have here.
I saw a post or tweet about a map? Does this exist somewhere already?
Looking to help make some Bitcoin noise on launch day. I'll be in san Diego or Kauai.
Not yet but very soon. We partnered with btcmap.org so Square businesses with bitcoin payments can opt in to display on the map.
We also built it directly in Cash App so it has a fully integrated discover/navigate/pay experience.
You’ll be able to find it in the bitcoin applet by Nov. 10 (official payments launch day)