According to the financial report of the quarter four of Twitter founder and bitcoin proponent Jack Dorsey’s Square, customers bought $178 million of Bitcoin.

In total, the peer-to-peer payments and stock trading Cash App generated $361 million in revenue, half of which came from bitcoin trading. During the entire 2019, the cryptocurrency brought in $510 million in revenue.

Source: Square's Bitcoin sales

This has been Square's Cash app’s 7th straight quarter of growth, seeing $239% of year-over-year growth. This growth has been despite bitcoin losing its value for the better part of 2018 and 2019.

In the quarter first and second of 2018, Bitcoin lost 50.74% and 8.17% of its value but gained 2.63% in 3Q18 only to lose 43.21% in 4Q18. In 2019, while the first two quarters were green by 10.34% and 161.50%, the last two recorded negative returns of 25.11% and 10.30%.

Also, the company reached 24 million active users in the three months ending Dec. 2019, which has been an increase of 60% in comparison to 2018. They exceeded the expectations of the market by raking in over $1.3 billion in revenue, a solid 41% YoY increase. As a result, the shares of Square rallied as much as 10% on this better-than-expected fourth quarter results.

About 90% of this revenue was also generated in the US and that’s why the coronavirus might have much of an impact on the company's return this year while PayPal lowered its outlook for first-quarter revenue growth by one percentage point.

Continued Growth

The Venmo competitor rolled out its bitcoin services across the US on its Cash App in the summer of 2018 and then in mid-2019, it allowed customers to deposit bitcoin into the app. For the first-quarter of 2020, the company is projecting up to $715 million in transaction and bitcoin costs.

On Wednesday's investor call, Chief Financial Officer Amrita Ahuja said once a user starts using the app for bitcoin buying and selling, they tend to generate 2-3 times the revenue by regular users. Ahuja said,

“We are able to efficiently acquire customers, keep them engaged and show them additional ways we can continue to add value.”

The company already has a dedicated division for bitcoin, Square Crypto that announced a software development kit last month to make it easier for applications to integrate the Lightning Network, the second 2 layer on the bitcoin network for cheaper and faster payments.