Jackie Reses on the regulatory chaos behind Square's Bitcoin launch

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]And so I just thought it was the coolest thing that in January of 2017 they were going to launch this crypto product. And then like the chaos starts, which is you're a public company and you want to launch a Bitcoin product.

[00:00:14]But there weren't really public companies that had Bitcoin. And so you have like counting implications, which is a really weird thing. You have SEC implications. So you have to take this idea to the SEC. But no one knows how to account for it. And so that is wackadoodle, right? You're trying to go then explain what kind of accounting it should be to your accounting firm. And so we almost got held up that first quarterly earnings period because we couldn't get accountants in the SEC to agree that we were accounting it correctly and then actually get it in the numbers in order to launch the product. And so and we weren't going to wait another quarter to make that happen. We were just anxious to release the product. And so I think everything about that experience just screams Jack Dorsey and his personality on steroids because of the energy and the creativity and the bombastic nature of the way he wanted to go get this product into the world.

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