Square Crypto taps former Google, Facebook and Lightning Labs execs for inaugural developer team

Square Crypto, a bitcoin-focused unit of payments company Square, has made three new hires.

In a series of tweets, Square Crypto announced the appointment of Facebook and BitGo alum Arik Sosman, Lightning Labs alum Valentine Wallace, and Google alum Jeffrey Czyz, CoinDesk reported. This follows the appointment of former Google director Steve Lee in June this year.

“My personal areas of interest are privacy and [Layer 2] scalability, though we’ll see what the team ultimately ends up working on. … I’m extremely excited and grateful for the opportunity to join this amazing team, and to focus on contributing to the most important cryptocurrency and ecosystem,” Sosman told CoinDesk.

Square Crypto said the immediate step now is to decide its first project, adding:

“In the spirit of open-sourcing, we want to hear from you. There’s no project we won’t consider, as long as it improves or proliferates bitcoin.”

It further said that it is still looking for a “very senior designer” for a position that is “bigger than a single product, and will play a major role in formalizing how the world interacts with bitcoin.”

Just recently, Square Crypto announced its first grant worth $100,000 to the BTCPay Foundation in support of BTCPay Server. It said that that BTCPay can use the grant to “create anything, as long as it’s free and open-source software that improves the security, scalability, privacy, user experience, or fungibility of bitcoin — or all of the above.”

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