On Sunday (February 2), Jack Dorsey, the Co-Founder and CEO of micro blogging platform Twitter (as well as Co-Founder and CEO of mobile payments company Square), sent out a tweet to demonstrate the symbol that now appears next to the “BTC” or the “bitcoin” hashtags when you create a tweet using the official Twitter app for iOS or Android.

Bitcoin Emoji.png

Note that in this tweet, the Twitter CEO has tagged the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organization based in Mountain View, California, the purpose of which is “to maintain and publish the Unicode Standard which was developed with the intention of replacing existing character encoding schemes which are limited in size and scope, and are incompatible with multilingual environments.” Presumably, his intention was to encourage the Consortium to consider adding a new graphic character representing Bitcoin to the character repertoire of the Unicode Standard.

As you can see in the replies to Dorsey’s tweet, one of the first Bitcoiners to enthusiastically welcome this idea was Elizabeth Stark, Co-Founder and CEO of Lightning Labs.

Many members of the crypto community have joined the party by sending out tweets that contain the “#bitcoin” hashtag in an effort to get this to become a “trending” hashtag on Twitter, thereby raising awareness.

Here are a couple of examples:

This is not the first time that Dorsey has expressed his support for Bitcoin.

According to Bloomberg, on 16 May 2018, Dorsey, shared his belief in Bitcoin with a crowd of crypto enthusiasts at the Consensus 2018 conference in New York:

The internet deserves a native currency; it will have a native currency. I don’t know if it’ll be Bitcoin or no, but hope it will be.

Last year, according to the transcript of Square’s Q2 2019 Earnings Conference Call, during the prepared remarks section of the earnings call, Dorsey made the following comments about Cash App:

The Cash App ecosystem continues to exceed our expectations. In just three years, Cash App revenue performed basically $0 million to $135 million, excluding Bitcoin. We love you, Bitcoin.

And more recently, on January 21, Square Crypto, the crypto-focused division of payment solutions provider Square, announced that, in order to accelerate bitcoin adoption, it is working on a Lightning Development Kit (LDK) that will make it easier for developers of wallets (and other applications) to “create custom experiences.”

Square Crypto, which was launched in March 2019, was “designed to strengthen the bitcoin ecosystem”, as product manager Steve Lee explained via the following tweets in July 2019: