After Jack Dorsey and David Marcus' resignations, digital payments is about to get busier

Jack Dorsey is stepping down as Twitter CEO, and the world is freaking out about it. 

Just take a look at Twitter shares: a 12.6-percent increase in less than an hour after the announcement. 

Actually, it’s not that much of a surprise.

If you’ve been using Twitter for the past few years, you may have felt that it lacked a certain ‘idea’ behind the platform. The ‘New’ features, such as fleets or spaces, were not engaging enough, their analytics was far from market standards, and ad formats were rather mediocre compared to Instagram or TikTok.

Appointing a new CEO – not biased with a “co-founder vision” – may actually be a way out of this conundrum.

For Jack Dorsey, growing Twitter was more about realizing a certain mission, and the business side was treated more like a stepchild. You can’t run a business like that – especially when you have two of them. Dorsey announced that he will now focus on Square, a digital payments company he founded in 2009, and honestly, I couldn’t imagine a better decision today.

Digital payments became one of the hottest, most rapidly growing playfields of the whole financial industry. Competing with either well-established players – like PayPal – or with a growing number of VC-backed startups (tens of 🦄s out there!) requires a strong focus and leadership. From this point of view, we might be witnessing the birth of another soon-to-be powerful payments company, because Dorsey is clearly going for the win in this arena.

Plus, he may have an ace up his sleeve.

Dorsey is known for being an advocate of blockchain, which he predicts to eventually become the world's single currency. BTC has been present in some of Twitter's latest features, and it’s obviously the only word in Dorsey’s Twitter bio right now. If Square goes at full speed into blockchain right now, this is where things could get really interesting. 

What does the market say? Square has seen only a slight increase on its shares (it would be skyrocketing by now if it was Elon tweeting about it), but let’s look back at it once we hear more details about its future.

He's not the only one.

24 hours after Dorsey's resignation, David Marcus, head of Meta's fintech/blockchain unit (formerly Facebook), announced that he decided to "step down and leave the company at the end of this year." A seasoned Facebook/ex-PayPal exec leaves to take some free time before "building something new and exciting again"? That's an interesting chain of events.

Mark my words: the digital payments sector is about to become one of the most interesting industries to watch.