Square Crypto announces former Google director Steve Lee as first hire

Square Crypto, a crypto-focused initiative announced by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, has finally made its first hire.

In a tweet, Square Crypto announced the appointment of former Google director Steve Lee. However, Lee’s role and responsibilities have not been revealed yet.

Lee left Google in 2015 after serving the company for eight years, CoinDesk reported. Since then, he has become a Bitcoin Optech contributor. Lee is also an angel investor and lists Lyft, Pinterest and Yardbarker as key exits.

Dorsey, who also co-founded San Francisco-based payments firm Square, first introduced “Square Crypto” in March 2019. He described it as “Square’s first open source initiative independent of [its] business objectives.”

At the time, Dorsey had revealed that they were looking for to hire three or four engineers and one designer to work full-time on open source contributions to the bitcoin/crypto ecosystem. The new hires will “focus entirely on what’s best for the crypto community” and not on Square’s commercial interests, he said.

In a tweet last month, Square Crypto had said that they are working on open source projects that will make crypto mass adoption “not just possible but inevitable.”