ARK Investment ups stake in Square following crypto product plans

ARK Investment Management, run by star stock picker Cathie Wood, has increased its holding in payments firm Square Inc (NYSE:SQ) after the latter unveiled plans to begin building crypto products. On Monday, the asset manager reportedly purchased 225.937 shares in Square after its chief executive, Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) boss Jack Dorsey, tweeted that the company is setting up a new business focused on building “an open developer platform” that will make it easier to create “non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services” with a primary focus on Bitcoin. Square is creating a new business (joining Seller, Cash App, & Tidal) focused on building an open developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services. Our primary focus is #Bitcoin. Its name is TBD. — jack (@jack) July 15, 2021 Square is also creating a new Bitcoin hardware wallet, Dorsey said, to make holding the crypto more mainstream. ARK is also a keen backer of crypto, with the company filing paperwork with US regulators last month to create a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF). READ: Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest plans Bitcoin ETF The group’s flagship Innovation fund also holds over US$800mln worth of shares in crypto trading platform Coinbase Global Inc (NASDAQ:COIN), making it one of the fund’s ten largest holdings. Shares in Square were down 1.1% at US$235 in pre-market trading in New York on Monday.