Block, the payments company led by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, announced on Thursday that Bitkey, a physical device on which customers can store Bitcoin, was officially open for preorders in more than 95 countries.
The Bitcoin wallet will ship in early 2024 and cost $150 in the U.S., a purchase price that includes the actual wallet, a charging cable, a mobile app, as well as recovery tools.
In an interview with Fortune, Lindsey Grossman, the business lead for Bitkey, touted the wide international availability of the hardware wallet but said that Block was focusing on a select number of countries to promote its new device. She pointed to the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Nigeria, Argentina, Mexico, and India as key markets where Block believes customers would use Bitcoin for both long-term savings as well as cross-border payments.
She declined to specify any internal sales projections for the hardware wallet and said that, currently, Bitkey is not available in any brick-and-mortar stores. However, Block is “definitely open to partnerships and exploring that,” she added.
The opening of Bitkey to the general public follows an open beta for the device announced in June, and it continues Dorsey and Block’s commitment to Bitcoin across the company’s business verticals, despite the cryptocurrency’s lack of centrality to Block’s current quarterly revenue.
Formerly known as Square, Block derives the majority of its profits from its digital wallet Cash App as well as its payments offering for businesses, Square. In the third quarter of 2023, Dorsey’s firm generated a gross profit of $1.9 billion. The profit derived from customers’ purchase and sale of Bitcoin, which Dorsey integrated into Cash App in 2018, was only $45 million.
That said, Dorsey is a noted Bitcoin evangelist, and in 2021, he changed the name of his payments company to Block to signify the firm’s commitment to integrating Bitcoin into its core business.
Since then, Dorsey himself has led a number of investments in Bitcoin-specific enterprises, including mining enterprises. Part of his Bitcoin boosterism is predicated on his belief—one that many in the Bitcoin community share—that the cryptocurrency is a means to open up the world’s financial system to those in developing countries who often struggle to gain access to banks.
Accordingly, Bitkey’s availability in more than 95 countries echoes that ideology, beliefs that trickle down to Dorsey’s employees. “We think that Bitcoin has the highest chance of actually solving true payments and economic problems for the world,” Grossman, the Bitkey business lead, said.
