FinTech news in Square category

Late Tuesday night, TBD, the Bitcoin-focused division of Jack Dorsey payments company Block (formerly Square), announced an ill-thought-out plan to trademark the term, which refers to its vision for a decentralized, privacy-focused iteration of the future web that TBD has been promoting in recent months. For several months, TBD has been promoting the term Web5, explaining how Web5 technologies could bring decentralized identity and data storage to applications while returning ownership of data and identity to individuals. In theory, Web5 would allow users to connect with apps using their decentralized identity, instead of constantly creating new profiles for services they wanted to try. This move, however, did not fly with the TBD community, as many pushed back at the idea that free and open-source technology needed such a gatekeeper.

The firm ballooning valuation, which surged from a $1.5 billion valuation it was given just six months ago by Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm, is reflective of their own volume growth but also that of other flagship NFT firms including Dapper Labs, which raised at a $7.6 billion valuation last year. The NFT space saw plenty of action in 2021, but OpenSea realizing this valuation will rely on its continued success and its ability to entice newbies into the burgeoning world of crypto collectibles.