Jack Dorsey says Square is launching a bitcoin-focused DeFi business

• Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced on Thursday that Square would launch a decentralized finance business focused on bitcoin.
• In his tweet, Dorsey promised the project would be fully open in terms of strategic planning and day-to-day development.
• DeFi has seen an explosion in interest of late, with hundreds of projects being launched.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced on Thursday that Square, his payments company, would launch a decentralized finance business focused on bitcoin.

The announcement came via tweet, in which Dorsey said Square would start building an as-of-yet unnamed "open developer platform." The project, led by a strategic director at Square's Cash App, will enable "non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services" for bitcoin, said Dorsey.

In his tweet, Dorsey promised the project would be fully open, both in terms of strategic planning and day-to-day development. The announcement comes a week after Square committed to building a bitcoin hardware wallet, letting users take ownership of their crypto-tokens without a third-party custodian.

Decentralized finance, or DeFi, has seen an explosion in interest of late, with hundreds of projects being launched. But most attention has been paid to ethereum-based applications like Uniswap and Maker.

Square's entry is likely to give a boost to bitcoin DeFi, an emerging space that is set to benefit from an upcoming protocol update. There are currently 26 active bitcoin DeFi projects, according to DeFi Prime.

Square was trading at $236.96 as of 10:46 a.m. ET, slightly up so far on the day.

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