Co-Founder, Block Head & Chairman, Block, Inc.
Jack Dorsey affirms Block’s bitcoin future and Do Kwon proposes Terra hard fork: CNBC Crypto World
CNBC Crypto World features the latest news and daily trading updates from the digital currency markets and provides viewers with a look at what’s ahead with high-profile interviews, explainers, and unique stories from the ever-changing crypto industry. On today’s show, Kate Rooney reports from the 2022 Permissionless conference in West Palm Beach, Florida, where she discusses the rise and fall of Terra with industry experts. Plus, Block holds its first investor day since 2017.
00:00 - CNBC Crypto World, May 18, 2022
0:23 - Crypto prices dip
1:39 - Permissionless 2022
5:30 - Block investor day...
About Jack Dorsey
Jack Dorsey discussed Block's Q1 2025 financial results, projecting gross profit growth of 12% for the year and an acceleration to low double digits in the third quarter. He noted that Square is gaining market share following consolidation efforts and that the company received FDIC approval to use Square Financial Services for nationwide consumer loans through Cash App Borrow, which he said roughly doubles the number of actives eligible for the product and improves unit economics. Dorsey also highlighted the integration of Afterpay products into Cash App, describing it as a "meaningful unlock" that exposes buy-now-pay-later products to 57 million monthly actives. At The Bitcoin Conference 2026, Dorsey appeared with filmmaker Eugene Jarecki to support the documentary "The Six Billion Dollar Man" about Julian Assange. Dorsey described Bitcoin as "an open protocol for money transfers" that routes around gatekeepers such as Visa, Mastercard, and banks. He also argued that traditional corporate hierarchy is obsolete, saying that companies can operate as "mini AGI" by placing an artificial intelligence "intelligence layer" at the center of the organization. Dorsey stated that after experimenting with AI tools in late 2024, Block's leadership uniformly agreed that if they were to rebuild the company from scratch, it would not be the same size or structure.
Transcript (16 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Kate Rooney0:00
Today it's Block's investor day and Jack Dorsey is doubling down on the company's focus on Bitcoin. I'm in West Palm Beach, Florida to talk with experts about what went wrong with Terra.
Welcome to CNBC's Crypto World Live outside the 2022 Permissionless Conference. I'm Kate Rooney. Crypto prices back in the red today. By noon Eastern, Bitcoin was worth around $29,000. Ether dipped below $2,000. Meanwhile, one cryptocurrency moving higher today is Terra USD. It's up 16% today but still worth far less than its dollar peg. Let's get to the latest on the Terra platform. Co-founder Do Kwon announced an on-chain proposal to split the network from the failed cryptocurrencies. The split is known as a hard fork, and Terraform Labs would rename the old network to Terra Classic. The token would be known as Luna Classic. The new network would focus on DeFi products that operate on the Terra blockchain rather than stablecoins like UST. In a preliminary poll on Terra's website, the proposal was very unpopular. 92% of respondents voted against the idea of a hard fork, but Do Kwon moved forward anyway. In other Terra news, the legal team representing Terraform Labs has resigned. The Block reports that Terraform's three lawyers left the company in the wake of UST's collapse. Terraform Labs told CoinDesk that a small number of employees have resigned since the cryptocurrency's crash, but the majority of employees remain committed to rebuilding the platform. Here at Permissionless, I spoke with experts across finance and crypto to find out just what went wrong with Terra's platform.
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Nick Carter1:46
People think of this as software engineering, but it's financial engineering. I remember calling you a couple months ago and saying something bad's gonna happen. I called Vic actually to be like, 'Hold on, can you explain this to me?' Yes, exactly. So it was pretty predictable if you had a little bit of perspective and were at least somewhat familiar with the history of currency pegs, and also if you had a little bit of sense and you inspected the mechanism. But not many people were willing to do that because it was really veiled in complexity, and I think deliberately so. Often crypto people have a habit of making things incredibly opaque and complex so that the relevant people can't investigate and understand the mechanisms.
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Kate Rooney2:37
Nick wasn't an outspoken skeptic of UST. When I asked him why there weren't more people speaking out about the risks with that stablecoin, here's what he told me.
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Nick Carter2:46
There was a sense that you didn't want to offend your industry colleagues, your industry peers who were invested in this frankly. And I'll be candid, Do Kwon was extremely aggressive with critics. I think everybody who was a high-profile critic experienced that. And the Terra army, they literally called themselves lunatics.
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Kate Rooney3:02
MakerDAO's Sam McPherson said the crash highlights the importance of over-collateralized stablecoins. Here's what he said.
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Sam McPherson3:12
I think this kind of highlights the need for collateralization and why MakerDAO has taken the more conservative approach of over-collateralizing. It doesn't scale quite as quickly, but in the end, the users who are holding DAI can be certain that they can trade it for a dollar, and that's what's important.
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Kate Rooney3:30
There's also a lot of talk about what this collapse means for the future of stablecoins. It's from users. Joelle Reginato said that developers need to focus on building platforms for developers and users, not just the stablecoin itself.
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Joelle Reginato3:43
I think it's very unfortunate for the stablecoin space because our belief is that the world needs this Uber-dollar API that runs on chain. We're all trying to build different versions of that. But if you think about it, the way that we look at something like USDC, it is a platform. I think people tend to focus a lot on the bare asset side of a stablecoin and the end users that hold it and transact, but actually it's such an important piece of substrate for the industry that you have all these ecosystems and developers and businesses building on top of that. From that perspective, we feel the responsibility for building a platform that is going to be there for developers and for businesses for the long term.
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Kate Rooney4:27
Finally, there's implications for the companies that are exploring crypto and stablecoins, especially. Catherine Gu with Visa's head of CBDC and crypto infrastructure build says the company will remain focused on fiat-backed stablecoins for now.
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Catherine Gu4:42
I think our focus currently at least is definitely on the fiat-backed side, and we're looking at these dual currencies and how they can potentially create very interesting use cases. I think generally speaking, how we're looking at the stablecoin space, there's the type of stablecoin in which you're managing your collateral on-chain, so things like MakerDAO, they have all the collateral on-chain. And then you have the USDC of the world which is managing those collaterals off-chain. You deposit the money in the bank. The way I think we're looking at it, for sure, I think by now it's pretty clear not every single stablecoin project is created equally. And when that name comes, which is stablecoin, I think we need to understand what the risk profiles associated with it are. I think we can associate that all the way back to the '08 crisis. If anything, even the safest asset can have risk.
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Kate Rooney5:30
Okay, another big story we're watching today: Block's investor day. Block is hosting its first investor day in five years, making the case that it's not just a payments company and Bitcoin is a big part of that future. Block executives want Wall Street to value this company as more than a payments pure play. Jack Dorsey saying, quote, 'We are no longer just a payments company. Block is now made up of different ecosystems.' He's got Square, Cash App, Tidal, and his big focus: those various Bitcoin businesses. Square CFO telling me calling it a payments company is like calling Amazon a bookstore. Now Bitcoin only accounts for about 5% of Block's gross profits, but it's still a big part of what Dorsey is focused on today at investor day.
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Jack Dorsey6:12
We also see Bitcoin as an extraordinary trend towards an open standard for global money transmission. That becoming a reality allows our entire business to move faster globally for sellers, consumers, and for artists. Given our expertise and experience with developer platforms and hardware, we decided to fill further gaps in the market which we believe will become massive parts of our business in the future. And a smart way to add resilience to our company.
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Kate Rooney6:37
Dorsey also says he's not as bullish on other cryptocurrencies and that the internet needs its own cryptocurrency. He says that Bitcoin is, quote, 'the only cryptocurrency that can fill that role.' Okay, before we go, I also spoke to Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev about the company's turnaround plan. Here is what he said.
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Vlad Tenev7:01
I couldn't be more confident in the future than I am now. And I'll tell you, Robinhood this past quarter, you've seen all the new products that we've been rolling out. And it's not just Robinhood 3, the web3 wallet, but things like stock lending, the 1% APY on your uninvested cash that we announced last week.
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Kate Rooney7:22
You can find that full interview over at CNBC.com. That's all for today, but we'll be back again tomorrow with a lot more. We'll see you then.