As fintech and crypto continue to converge with fewer and fewer clear boundaries, if one were asked to name the fintech company that was most crypto-friendly just a few years ago, Block, Inc. (formerly Square) would likely have been the obvious answer.

Block operates a wide range of products and services, including Square, Cash App, Afterpay, TIDAL, and Bitkey. Yet when looking at recent stock performance alone, Block has noticeably underperformed many of its peers.

There are multiple reasons behind this trend, but perhaps the most fundamental issue is that Block has become a somewhat “ambiguous company” that is difficult to define in a single sentence.

As its service portfolio expanded too broadly, it became increasingly hard for investors to clearly understand Block’s core business and growth narrative. The relatively expensive acquisition of Afterpay, along with the Hindenburg Research short report in 2023, also weighed heavily on market perception.

Against this backdrop, Block reached a point where it needed more than incremental product updates. What it required was a clear structural direction and a long-term growth roadmap. Investor Day 2025, held in San Francisco on November 19, 2025, was Block’s response to that need. The event was meaningful not only for clarifying Block’s own strategic direction, but also as a signal of how the broader fintech industry may be re-shaping itself. This article highlights several of the most notable takeaways from the announcement.

Before diving into the insights from Investor Day, it is helpful to briefly review Block’s major business lines as they stood prior to the event.

1. Cash App: A Consumer Finance Super App

Cash App began as a peer-to-peer payments application, but rapidly expanded to include debit cards, deposits, direct deposit for payroll, stock and Bitcoin investing, BNPL, and short-term lending through Borrow. Particularly among younger users in the United States, Cash App has achieved high engagement and has become a central interface for everyday financial activity rather than just a payments tool. It remains the primary growth engine for Block in terms of both user growth and transaction volume.

1. Square: An Operating Platform for Small Businesses

Square represents the core of Block’s B2B business. It provides payments and operational infrastructure for small and medium-sized businesses, spanning POS hardware, payment processing, inventory management, employee management, payroll, marketing, and Square Loans. Square is less a standalone payments solution and more a comprehensive operating system for offline commerce.

1. Afterpay: A BNPL Network

Afterpay, acquired by Block in 2022, is a BNPL service that offers installment payment options across online and offline commerce. While Afterpay established strong brand recognition on its own, there has been ongoing skepticism about whether its acquisition meaningfully strengthened synergies with Cash App and Square.

1. Bitkey and Proto: The Bitcoin Division

Unlike most fintech companies, Block has consistently treated Bitcoin not merely as an investment product, but as long-term infrastructure. This philosophy is most clearly reflected in Bitkey and Proto. Bitkey is a self-custody Bitcoin wallet designed to allow users to manage their own keys without relying on exchanges. Proto, on the other hand, encompasses Block’s Bitcoin mining infrastructure, including custom-designed ASIC chips, mining hardware, and management software.

While this theme did not appear for the first time at Investor Day 2025, Jack Dorsey emphasized more clearly than before that Block’s core differentiation lies in being a full-stack company capable of designing everything from hardware to software in-house.

Unlike most fintech firms that treat hardware lightly or outsource it entirely, Block has directly designed and shipped more than 30 million hardware devices since the Square era, including POS terminals and card readers. In doing so, Block has built long-standing relationships across its entire supply chain, from semiconductor foundries to manufacturing partners. This creates a structural moat that is difficult for other fintech companies to replicate quickly.

This hardware-centric philosophy carries over directly into Proto.

Proto can be seen as the application of Block’s accumulated hardware DNA to Bitcoin mining infrastructure. Traditional mining rigs are often disposable, requiring full replacement after a certain lifecycle. Proto instead adopts a modular design, where only the hashboards need to be upgraded while the rest of the system remains intact. This approach closely resembles a razor-and-razorblade model.

Critically, Proto’s design and business model would be nearly impossible without Block’s existing hardware manufacturing capabilities. Very few companies can control ASIC design, mechanical engineering, manufacturing partnerships, and long-term upgrade cycles under one roof. Proto further emphasizes that both design and assembly take place entirely within the United States, offering strategic advantages in supply chain resilience and geopolitical risk compared to the heavily region-concentrated mining hardware market.

Ultimately, Proto is less a new revenue line and more a unique manifestation of Block’s long-standing obsession with Bitcoin and hardware. A fintech company building Bitcoin mining equipment is already unusual. Re-architecting that equipment as long-term infrastructure with integrated software and upgrade cycles is an approach that only Block could realistically pursue.

One of the most striking shifts at Investor Day 2025 was Block’s clear move away from optimizing each business independently, toward intentionally creating network effects across its different services.

The most important change lies in how Block now positions the relationship between Square and Cash App. Historically, Square served merchants while Cash App served consumers, with little practical interaction beyond corporate affiliation. At Investor Day, Block repeatedly signaled its intent to break down that separation.

At the center of this effort is Neighborhoods. The problem it addresses is straightforward. Small businesses are increasingly dependent on advertising platforms for customer acquisition, while consumers have fewer organic touchpoints with local merchants.

Block’s solution through Neighborhoods is equally clear.

• Cash App users can discover nearby Square merchants, place orders, and pay directly within the app.

• Merchants gain exposure to Cash App’s large consumer network without managing separate advertising campaigns.

The key insight is that Neighborhoods is not merely a store discovery feature, but a behavior-driven network layer. Visit frequency, payment history, and spending patterns automatically inform recommendations and rewards. Merchants can drive repeat visits and loyalty without manual configuration. This is only possible because Square’s payment data and Cash App’s consumer data are unified within a single system.

Other initiatives follow the same logic, such as encouraging Square Payroll employees to receive wages via Cash App, and gradually absorbing Afterpay into Cash App rather than maintaining it as a standalone BNPL brand. All are deliberate attempts to engineer network effects across Block’s ecosystem.

Another major theme is the role of AI agents and blockchain, particularly Bitcoin, as foundational fintech components. Block’s vision positions AI agents as the new financial frontend, with blockchain operating as the backend settlement layer.

On the frontend, Block introduced Moneybot and Managerbot.

• Moneybot functions as a personal CFO for Cash App users. It continuously monitors income, spending, balances, and investments, automatically adjusting budgets, savings, asset allocation, and short-term liquidity.

• Managerbot serves as an automated COO for Square merchants. Using data on sales, inventory, staffing, and supply chains, it autonomously handles payroll scheduling, workforce allocation, inventory replenishment, and marketing execution.

In both cases, the traditional app interface based on buttons and manual configuration becomes increasingly unnecessary. Rather than asking users what to do next, agents understand context and proactively suggest or execute actions.

At the same time, Block is re-architecting the backend of payments and settlement. According to Investor Day disclosures, Cash App users can now send money denominated in USD while settlement occurs over the Bitcoin network. From the user’s perspective, everything remains USD-native. The change is entirely behind the scenes, in how money moves and settles.

Block’s endgame is a system where AI agents manage financial activity on behalf of users, while an open settlement network minimizes dependence on traditional banks.

If Banking-as-a-Service abstracted bank APIs, Block aims to abstract the bank itself.

Perhaps the clearest takeaway from Investor Day 2025 is that lending is no longer a peripheral feature for Block, it is the company’s core business and primary revenue engine.

Across Square Loans, Cash App Borrow, and Afterpay BNPL, Block originates over $50 billion in loans annually, and the most emphasized metrics at Investor Day were concentrated in this area.

Block focuses less on loan size and more on capital efficiency. Loan margins are approximately 2 percent, yet return on invested capital reaches the high-20 percent range. This is driven by ultra-short-duration, high-velocity lending. Cash App Borrow loans average roughly 21 days in duration, allowing capital to turn over more than 15 times per year. While individual loan profitability is modest, velocity compensates.

With warehouse facilities or deposit-based funding, Block indicated that return on equity could exceed 100 percent.

This performance is enabled by superior underwriting data.

Cash App Borrow evaluates risk using P2P payment flows, payroll deposits, card usage, balances, and in-app behavior rather than relying primarily on traditional credit scores. Approximately 70 percent of Borrow users fall into subprime categories by FICO standards, yet long-term loss rates remain below 3 percent. This reflects not risk avoidance, but more precise risk measurement and control.

Square Loans exhibits similar structural advantages. Because Square directly controls merchant revenue flows, repayment is automatically deducted from sales. Lending becomes embedded within business operations rather than a standalone financial product.

Ultimately, Block’s lending business sits atop its broader network strategy and AI automation. As Square and Cash App become more interconnected, data quality improves. As Moneybot and Managerbot automate user behavior, predictability increases. Lending is the layer where all of Block’s strategic threads converge into tangible profit.

At its core, Block’s message at Investor Day 2025 was relatively simple. Block no longer sees itself as a company operating multiple payment apps or financial features. It is building a single underlying structure on which all of its businesses rest.

For the first time, Block’s disparate businesses felt coherently woven into a single narrative.