On Wednesday (March 20th), Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and Square, announced that FinTech startup Square is hiring four full-time “crypto engineers” to “work full-time on open source contributions to the bitcoin/crypto ecosystem” and proceeded to explain why.

Dorsey has been a huge fan of crypto in general and Bitcoin in particular for quite a while now, and this was by no means the first time that he has publicly talked about crypto. For example, here’s what he tweeted on 30 December 2016:

 On 16 May 2018, according to Bloomberg, while speaking at the Consensus 2018 conference, he had this to say about Bitcoin:

“The internet deserves a native currency; it will have a native currency. I don’t know if it’ll be Bitcoin or not, but I hope it will be.”

More recently, on February 1st, during an interview with Joe Rogan (episode #1236 of “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast), Dorsey once again reiterated that he believed Bitcoin would eventually become the “native currency” of the Internet:

“So, back to the Internet, I believe the Internet will have a native currency. It will have a native currency, and I don't know if it's Bitcoin, and I think it will [be] given all the tests that it's been through, the principles behind it, how it was created… It was something that was born on the Internet, developed on the Internet, it was tested on the Internet. It is of the Internet… And the second thing is that we would love to see something become a global currency. It enables more access. It allows us to serve more people. It allows us to move much faster around the world.”

Dorsey’s most recent words about crypto, though, came on Wednesday (March 20th), when he started with a tweet that looked like a job posting:

He then explained that he had arrived at this decision as a result of a conversation last week with Square employee Mike Brock, who is leading Strategic Development for the Cash App, during which Brock had told Dorsey that the best way to help the crypto community was by improving the crypto ecosystem:

Next, Dorsey pointed out that although Square was going to be hiring these crypto enginners and paying them, none of the work that they will be driven by Square’s business interests, and that whatever contributions they make will be open source and free for anyone to use:

Dorsey thinks of this initiative as giving back (“in a small way”) to the open source community:

And this is how he professed his love for blockchain technology and the crypto community:

Dorsey’s idea has been met by thunderous applause. Here are some of the reactions:

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (“CZ”) also joined the conversation by pointing out that Binance is happy to pay its employees in Bitcoin (BTC) or Binance Coin (BNB):