an AI agent in your Cash App

Hi,

The Boys Club team is headed to Buenos Aires for Devconnect. November 18th is The Big Day™️. So come say hi at one of these events.

AM) Money Rails, we’ll be speaking AND livestreaming from Polygon’s full-day summit on internet-native, programmable money. Come say hi!

PM) The Hard Launch party with Polygon, Pod Network and pals Privy and Blockaid. RSVP now, like right now.

Love,

The Boys

Writer: Deana

Editor: Miranda

Say GOODBYE to seed phrases with Bitkey, a Bitcoin wallet.

Use code BOYSCLUB20 for a discount on your Bitkey.

Cash App Me. Yesterday, your favorite ~new media~ outlet (us) got a sneak preview of Cash App’s latest features at an immersive press day near Union Square in NYC. Disclosure, Boys Club works with Bitkey (see above) but this was an unpaid, editorial endeavor.

Cash App is very much designing for our evolving relationship with money. 40% of their customers are what they call “independent earners,” or people whose primary income is not from traditional W-2 employment or direct deposits. This is where the puck is going.

Though they didn’t say it outright, it’s clear they’re positioning Cash App as a replacement for the trad bank account. One that’s not a third space for your money, but your primary account. (A hope we’ve heard from Brian Armstrong at Coinbase as well.) Cash App’s souped-up ‘Cash App Green’ program speaks to this, providing perks and rewards akin to a bank account, that scale with activity.

If I were the CEO of Chase Bank, I’d have feelings.

Credit access and BNPL. They cited a stat that 100 million people in the US are left out of the credit market, and building for access was a repeated theme. To that end, a few new Afterpay features were announced to help “smooth over” customers’ cashflows. They’re making it pretty frictionless to borrow in a few quick swipes in the app, which tbh gives me a litttttttttttle pause. Though they did speak to safety measures like fee transparency and, critically, not letting folks roll over loans.

Now, to the crypto of it all.

Jack Dorsey, the founder of Cash App, Square, TWITTER etc., is famously a pretty immovable Bitcoin maximalist, with the Tweet below demonstrating 1) a low-key disdain for the tokens and 2) a staunch belief that Bitcoin is superior hard money. (Nothing but respect to Jack for his consistency btw.)

So I was genuinely surprised and delighted to see Cash App make a move into stablecoins. It’s not necessarily a full embrace of ‘crypto’; but it is a pragmatic acceptance that the stablecoin, or “digital dollar,” as they called it, is often the best tool for the job in a peer to peer stack.

They used USDC in a demo showing off a new feature that lets you send stables from your Cash App balance to an external wallet address. They mentioned supporting “multiple stablecoins,” though didn’t reveal which ones.

In addition to the Square Bitcoin map, they also unveiled a new Bitcoin payments feature in the app. It lets customers pay merchants in USD, but then instantly coverts to Bitcoin for the merchant without fees or spread. “USD payments on Bitcoin rails,” undercutting the credit card fees for merchants.

The challenge. 24 million Cash App users have bought Bitcoin, and presumably many of them still hold a Bitcoin balance in their wallets. So, this is potentially a big deal if (BIG IF!) they can convince people that Bitcoin is spendable money. The merchant side is now incentivized, so there is a flywheel waiting to start spinning if the behavior shift does arrive.

Then came Moneybot. An in-app, agentic assistant that can both give personalized advice and take action on a user’s behalf (with their approval.) We saw Moneybot moving money into savings and splitting a bill, and also prompting a user with suggestions for what to do with their funds.

Moneybot pulls from your financial history, but also has access to the full big brain of insights across their huge database. People seemed really into Moneybot and I get it.

Do I want more DeFi flavor (staking??) in the app? Yes I do. Idk if/how they get there given Dorsey’s stance on that side of the industry, but I’m hoping.

All in all, an inspiring day. We spotted Emily Sundberg (Feed Me), Oren John (@orenmeetsworld) and Associated Press reporter with whom Natasha spent a few weeks at the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan, covering the SBF trial.

That chapter truly feels like a distant memory after the momentum on display yesterday. Amen.