Jack Dorsey Continues His Crypto Evangelism as Twitter Debuts Bitcoin Emoji

In the world of Silicon Valley giants, there’s hardly anyone as vocal in his support of Bitcoin as Twitter’s boss Jack Dorsey. He has never shied away from his love for Bitcoin and the benefits that the top cryptocurrency brings, even going as far as making Bitcoin support the focal point of Square’s Cash App. 

New Twitter Emoji for Bitcoin as Advocates Push for Unicode Integration

However, his latest contribution to the drive for Bitcoin adoption is on the platform that drove him to worldwide fame. Yesterday, Twitter debuted the Bitcoin emoji, to the delight of thousands of pro-Bitcoin Twitter users. In the early hours of the day, Dorsey tweeted the new Bitcoin emoji to the world, tagging Unicode- the worldwide consortium that manages the character standard- to adopt the emoji and make it official.

#bitcoin cc:@unicode

— jack (@jack) February 2, 2020

The addition of the emoji is an extraordinary show of support for the asset. The Bitcoin emoji rocketed to the top of worldwide trending charts on Twitter yesterday, with every pro-Bitcoin Twitter user jumping at the chance to use it in a tweet and get the word to spread. Of course, the popularity of the emoji was eventually eroded, as the day gave way to Super Bowl LIV- another landmark event that also got its personalized emoji. 

#Twitter added a #Bitcoin emoji (you can see Jack using it in his profile). I suspect a much deeper #btc integration is coming though. pic.twitter.com/WPqARpfHMT

— Alex Melen (@amelen) February 3, 2020

Twitter has been doing a lot of emoji rollout recently. Several events (Super Bowl, Grammys, Oscars Golden Globes, and others.) and people (Shakira, Lionel Messi, and Mohammed Salah.) have gotten custom-made emojis made by the social media platform, thus driving conversion and allowing their fans to speak about them more. Bitcoin is just the latest in the increasing line of things and people to have their personalized emojis.

Dorsey’s calls for the Bitcoin emoji to be included in the Unicode text encoding standard have also picked up some steam, with several members of the crypto community lending their voices to make it happen. Elizabeth Stark, a co-founder at Lightning Labs, called for more people to submit proposals to Unicode, while TRON Foundation chief executive Justin Sun posted the Bitcoin hashtag as well. 

Dorsey’s Continued Quest for Bitcoin Adoption 

The Twitter chief executive is doing much more to help spread the word about crypto and blockchain, however. Square- the payment processor that Dorsey also founded- has made significant progress in driving crypto adoption. Earlier this month, the firm was granted a patent for a technology which it believes will help real-time crypto-to-fiat swaps.

Square Crypto, created by Jack Dorsey last year, said in a blog post that it's "only a matter of time until instant, low-fee bitcoin payments are as common as cash used to be": https://t.co/hemOvjFvcf by @BillyBambrough pic.twitter.com/e3U123wER7

— Forbes Crypto (@ForbesCrypto) January 27, 2020

In its patent application, the Square team noted several drawbacks to current crypto spending. As they pointed out, transactions still take a while to get processed, making some transactions difficult to make with Bitcoin. For now, it’s not realistic to pay for a coffee and wait 30 minutes for confirmation on the blockchain. There’s also the fact that fluctuating exchange rates could pose a risk to business owners. 

However, the technology proposed by the company would utilize a simple process. It would initiate a payment request in the consumer’s crypto of choice. Once approved, the merchant gets the value in their currency of choice. All of this will purportedly be done in real-time, and with a focus on privacy.