Financial payments startup Square was at work Friday on a real-world wallet for safely pocketing bitcoin cryptocurrency.
Square founder & chief Jack Dorsey, who is additionally the highest executive at Twitter, had tweeted last month ask for feedback on the notion.
“This community’s response to our thread about this project has been awesome—encouraging, generous, collaborative & galvanizing ,” Jesse Dorogusker of the Square hardware team tweeted on Thursday.
“We have decided to create a hardware wallet & repair to form bitcoin custody more mainstream.”
Dorsey endorsed Dorogusker’s post with a tweet of “We’re doing it bitcoin.”
Hardware wallets are often wont to store digital currency offline, synching with applications for transactions on the web as required .
Another option for cryptocurrency owners is to use “virtual” wallets, essentially trusting 3rd parties to stay money safe & using passwords to access funds.
Dorsey reasoned in tweets that bitcoin may be a currency for the masses, which it’s important to possess ways for people to carry it that do not involve entrusting it to outside parties.
“The exchange you wont to buy your bitcoin probably attends to your security with good intent, but circumstances may reveal ‘custody’ actually means ‘IOU,'” Dorsey tweeted in June.
“Deciding to require custody, and security, of your bitcoin is complicated.”
He envisioned a bitcoin wallet that creates it easy for people to use a number of it for shopping, for instance through smartphones, while protecting rest of the cryptocurrency.
“We can imagine apps that work without Square & perhaps also without permission from Apple & Google,” he continued, pertaining to the manufacturers of the world’s big two smartphone operating systems.
Square will found out accounts at Twitter & software developer community website GitHub dedicated to the bitcoin wallet project, said Dorsey.
