Jack Dorsey pulled a Meta with his Block rebrand of Square

Well, he finally did it. After many a fraught year, Jack Dorsey stepped down from his second run as CEO of Twitter earlier this week, this time for good. In doing so, he leaves the world an objectively more horrifying and chaotic place, but he’s obviously got zero time to reflect on that. No, he’s far too busy diving deeper down the Bitcoin/Blockchain rabbit hole.

And to prove it, he did what we all pretty much knew to be inevitable: Rebrand his remaining company, Square, to focus more on all things cryptocurrency. To mark the occasion, he announced the new, improved shape-based business family: Block.

Get it? Like, a square is flat and one-dimensional, but a block? Woo boy, that’s got all kinds of dimensions to it! Well, technically just three, but you see what Dorsey is trying to get at there. We will at least admit this: It’s a far more aesthetically pleasing redesign than, say, that other maligned social media behemoth’s recent image rehabilitation campaign.

New kids on the Block — Much like Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to change his umbrella corporation’s name to Meta, Dorsey seeks to do something very similar with Block, describing it as “an overarching ecosystem of many businesses united by their purpose of economic empowerment, and serves many people — individuals, artists, fans, developers, and sellers.” Sound familiar?

To be clear, Square is still Square, as is Cash App, TIDAL, and whatever the hell TBD54566975 is (it’s a Bitcoin-centric open development platform). The only Dorsey entity getting a name change is Square Crypto, which is now simplied to Spiral and described as dedicated to “build and fund free, open-source projects aimed at making bitcoin the planet’s preferred currency.”

Seems more useful than the metaverse — In Block’s defense (we can’t believe we just typed that), the umbrella company’s services are mostly pretty helpful and well-designed. Square is pretty much the go-to digital payment system for countless businesses, and Cash App remains an immensely popular and streamlined finance alternative. While we’re still a long way off from Bitcoin being the de facto currency Dorsey believes it will one day become, it’s certainly way easier to see this being more popular than, say, Meta VR glasses from Zuckerberg.

So yeah, this was an inevitable move on Dorsey’s part, but certainly not one without its uses.