Jack Dorsey hopes bitcoin will help bring about world peace

Square CEO Jack Dorsey has high hopes for digital asset and aspiring currency bitcoin.

“My hope is that it creates world peace or helps create world peace,” Dorsey said during a “The B Word” webinar on Wednesday.

“We have all these monopolies off balance and the individual doesn’t have power and the amount of cost and distraction that comes from our monetary system today is real and it takes away attention from the bigger problems,” Dorsey added. Tesla CEO Elon Musk and ARK Invest founder, CEO and CIO Cathie Wood were also speakers on the panel.

“All these distractions that we have to deal with on a daily basis take away from those bigger goals that effect every single person on this planet and increasingly so. You fix that foundational level and everything above it improves in such a dramatic way. It’s going to be long-term but my hope is definitely peace,” the founder of Twitter added.

Dorsey is a long-time advocate of the digital currency, saying in 2018 the cryptocurrency will eventually become the world’s “single currency.” Last year, Square purchased about $50 million in bitcoin, representing about 1% of its balance sheet.

Last week, Dorsey announced that Square is creating a new business focused on “decentralized financial services” using bitcoin. Decentralized finance, or DeFi, applications aim to recreate traditional financial systems, such as banks and exchanges, with cryptocurrency. Most run on the ethereum blockchain.

 Dorsey said on Twitter late Thursday that the company is “focused on building an open developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services.”

After that announcement last week, Wood’s ARK Invest purchased another 225,937 shares of Square worth around $53.6 million, based on Square’s closing price from last Thursday.