Sending and receiving money is becoming easier than ever. Technology and apps such as Venmo and Zelle make it a snap to pay a friend back for lunch. They also allow you to request payments from someone if they owe you money.
And it’s all digital--no cash exchanges hands. That makes things much more convenient than the old-school way of reimbursing someone with cash or paper checks (remember those?). However, allowing an app direct access to your bank account may not be completely appealing to everyone.
I for one resisted downloading Venmo for a long time. I was that old school friend who had to write someone a check if I owed them money for a gift or for that bottle of wine we split at dinner. Then I finally took the plunge and got Venmo--it’s definitely made giving and receiving cash much easier. But there’s still that niggling thought in the back of my mind that Venmo has access to my checking account.
Cash App
Another alternative to Venmo is Cash App. It, too, allows users to send and receive money as needed. It also features a few other perks, like allowing you to create a design for a debit card issued by the company. Users can also advance their paychecks and have the ability to skip ATM fees if they meet a certain dollar amount each month.
Cash App and Crypto
To make this particular app even more appealing, Cash App is testing a way for users to send or receive bitcoin. This feature isn’t yet available to all users, just a lucky (undisclosed) few.
Cash App is using something called Lightning Network to facilitate these bitcoin transactions. Lightning Network is a layer-2 payment protocol. It’s decentralized, so it isn’t reliant on one central platform.
It reportedly employs “smart contracts” for bitcoin and other types of crypto that are based on blockchain technology. Essentially, the smart contracts allow payments to happen quickly and for a multitude of users in a network. And the payments are said to happen instantly--in seconds or even in fractions of a second.
Just like with transferring cash, the users testing this feature are able to send and receive bitcoin. But the Lightning Network allows them to do that “without creating a on-blockchain transaction for individual payments,” according to their website.
In other words, the person paying bitcoin and the person receiving bitcoin create a transaction which isn’t sent to the blockchain. Lightning Network likens this to signing a contract with someone else, yet not appearing before a judge each time a contract needs to be signed. And you would only appear before a judge about a contract if something goes wrong, which is similar to how they’re operating the bitcoin transactions.
This could help alleviate the worry of an app having direct access to the cash in users’ bank accounts if it works out.
The Name Behind Cash App
Cash App is part of a corporate entity named Block. If you haven’t heard of this entity before, it’s probably because you’re more familiar with its former name: Square. That’s right, Square changed its name in recent months. And, at least from my perspective as a Square user, that name change was made pretty quietly.
What’s more is that Jack Dorsey co-founded Square and serves as the CEO. You likely have heard of his name before, thanks to his previous role as a co-founder and CEO of Twitter. Dorsey’s tweets reveal that he has implied he believes that bitcoin will actually take the place of the dollar.
Perhaps it’s not too surprising that Square became Block which is now testing out Cash App to facilitate easier bitcoin exchanges between people.
Sending and Receiving Crypto
For now, Cash App is simply testing out a way to quickly send and receive crypto. Hopefully, their trial goes well and they expand this feature out to all users in the near future.
