Cash App Users Can Now Invest Their Paychecks Into Bitcoin

Starting today, U.S. customers of Cash App, a mobile payment service run by Block (formerly Square), will be able to automatically invest a portion (or the entirety) of their direct-deposit paychecks into bitcoin. Cash App’s Bitcoin Product Lead Miles Suter made the announcement this morning at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami.

The feature, called ‘Paid in Bitcoin’, allows Cash App’s clients with activated Cash Cards (Visa debit cards connected to the service) to have a percentage of their direct deposits automatically converted into bitcoin at no cost. Customers can choose to have their deposits converted, from as little as 1% to 100%, to bitcoin with the ability to reconfigure at any time.

Two additional features were also announced. In the near future, users will be able to round up their Cash Card transaction to the nearest dollar and automatically invest the spare change into the cryptocurrency, Cash App said.

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Earlier this year, Cash App introduced an integration with the Lightning Network—a so-called bitcoin’s layer 2 that allows users to send or receive the cryptocurrency quickly and cheaply by moving transactions off the main layer—enabling users to send bitcoin to any Lightning-compatible wallet and thus pay with bitcoin using the Lightning Network. Soon, Cash App’s U.S. users (except those in New York State) will also be able to receive bitcoin via the Lightning Network. Cash App claims that this new feature will make bitcoin transactions nearly instant, from an average of upwards of 10 minutes.

Yesterday, Cash App’s parent company, Block, confirmed a data breach affecting millions of Cash App users. In its April 4 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the firm disclosed that a former Block employee downloaded Cash App’s customer data, exposing the stock activity of 8.2 million customers, including in some cases brokerage portfolio value, brokerage portfolio holdings and stock trading activity for one trading day. The incident took place on Dec. 10 last year, Block said.