Payment Platform Square’s Q1 2019 Bitcoin Revenue High, Crypto Profits Low

Payment platform Square saw a new revenue high from bitcoin (BTC) sales through its Cash app, while profits from Bitcoin sales remained low, according to a letter to shareholders outlining first quarter (Q1) 2019 financial figures.

In its recently published letter on earnings — which is unaudited — Square revealed that in the Q1 2019 the company’s total net revenue grew 43% year over year, amounting to $959 million, wherein bitcoin revenue was $65.5 million. Bitcoin costs for the same period reportedly amounted to $64.7 million, meaning that overall bitcoin profits amounted to roughly $830,000.

In the fourth quarter of 2018, the company registered total net revenue of $933 million, with $52 million attributed to bitcoin revenue. At the same time, bitcoin costs equalled $51.9 million.

Square made bitcoin trading available to users in February of last year. Since Square operates on a Point of Sale network, the addition of BTC to its mobile services means that any merchant that uses Square’s payment system will potentially be able to accept bitcoin as a form of payment.

In March, Square and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that Square was hiring cryptocurrency engineers and was offering to pay them in bitcoin. Dorsey further commented that the decision to pay employees in digital currency is based on the intention “to make the broader crypto ecosystem better,” thus contributing to the bitcoin community.

As Cointelegraph reported in January, cryptocurrency payment service provider BitPay reported $1 billion in transactions this past year. In late 2018, BitPay’s CEO claimed that he expects mass bitcoin adoption to come in three to five years. In November, BitPay’s chief commercial officer, Sonny Singh, predicted that bitcoin’s price will soar to between $15,000 to $20,000 by the end of 2019.