Square started out in 2009 as a payment-services provider, enabling small businesses to process card payments with inexpensive white card readers and tablets. Since then, the Jack Dorsey-led company has added more services for businesses, a digital-payments service for consumers known as Cash App, a payments platform for artists, and a developer platform that plans to build a decentralised bitcoin exchange.

Cash App's growth exploded earlier this year, partly from a flood of pandemic stimulus payments. The digital-payments app lets people send money to one another via smartphone, purchase things with a prepaid debit card and invest in bitcoin and fractions of individual stocks. It competes with digital wallets from other payment firms, such as PayPal.