On the early morning of April 6, Block posted a tweet on X: “The bitcoin faucet is back.” The link points to btc.day. Jack Dorsey then retweeted.

“faucet” is a very old term in the crypto industry, and it’s also a very old way of doing things: free token claims sent to a wallet. This culture can be traced back as far as 2010. Back then, Bitcoin had only just been born for less than two years. One bitcoin was worth only a few dollars, hardly anyone knew it existed, and no one knew what it would become later.

Early developer Gavin Andresen, at his own computer, built a simple webpage using the BTC he had on hand. He was one of the core developers in the early circle of Satoshi-era folks, with code contributions that ranked near the top. But he didn’t make this page for project promotion, nor to tell a fundraising story. He simply thought that for this network to survive, more people needed to truly hold Bitcoin in real life—experience this peer-to-peer payment network firsthand—rather than just discuss it on an email list.

The page’s logic was just one thing: you come in, solve a captcha, 5 bitcoins go into your wallet, done. No minimum purchase requirement, no account linking, and no additional conditions whatsoever. Anyone, visit, claim, and leave.

That page ran for a few months. Andresen kept supplying it with his own BTC until it was nearly out, and only then he shut the page down. In total, he sent out roughly 19,700 BTC.

At today’s price of about $67,000, that’s about $1.3 billion.

This “faucet” culture hasn’t left the crypto industry either.

“Faucet Is Back”

Back to Jack Dorsey. We all know he’s the co-founder of Twitter (now X), but in recent years he has shifted his focus completely to Block—formerly Square, a fintech company with Bitcoin at the core of its strategy.

Block’s main products include:

• Cash App: a mobile payments and Bitcoin purchasing platform for everyday users;

• Square: payment terminals and merchant receiving systems for businesses;

• Bitkey: Block’s self-developed Bitcoin hardware wallet, focused on self-custody;

• Proto Rig: a modular Bitcoin mining rig that Block launched in August 2025;

Jack Dorsey himself is a steadfast Bitcoin believer. He has publicly said, “Bitcoin will become the native currency of the internet, and fiat money will eventually disappear.” Everything in his business setup has been built around that belief.

Returning to Block’s activity itself, we can see that the rewards on the page are divided into three tiers: purchase $10 or more worth of BTC on Cash App, and you get $5 worth of BTC back; pay Square merchants with Bitcoin, and you get $25 worth of BTC back; withdraw BTC to a Bitkey hardware wallet, and you get $50 worth of BTC back.

btc.day campaign page

Do all three, and you can get up to $80 worth of BTC.

The total reward pool is $1 million. The campaign ends on April 10. It’s first come, first served—once the rewards are claimed, it stops. It’s limited to U.S. residents who are at least 18 years old. There’s also a detail in the terms: residents of New York can buy BTC on Cash App, but they can’t claim the reward tiers for Square payments or Bitkey withdrawals. New York’s crypto licensing rules block those two actions.

If we line up the three reward tiers side by side, the structure is also very clear. Behind each tier is a specific product line in the Block ecosystem:

The $5 tier activates the action of a user making their first BTC purchase in Cash App, helping form a buying habit;

The $25 tier drives users to try spending with Bitcoin at physical merchants—that is, actual Bitcoin circulation through Square’s merchant network;

And the $50 reward is the highest. It incentivizes transferring Bitcoin to your own controlled Bitkey hardware wallet, promoting the self-custody concept. This is exactly the step Block most wants to push.

With the $1 million it buys, Block gets deep product experiences from a large number of real users across its three product lines—far more cost-effective than any advertising.

The campaign was launched when the Bitcoin price was around $67,000, down nearly 50% compared with the year-end 2025 peak of $126,000. With market sentiment subdued, Block took the initiative and launched a “free BTC” campaign. On the one hand, it can attract users who are waiting and watching; on the other hand, it also sends the market a clear signal of Block’s unwavering confidence in Bitcoin’s long-term value.

On the other hand, this also aligns with Jack Dorsey’s vision of financial inclusion. Jack Dorsey has long argued that Bitcoin is not only an investment tool, but also a financial tool for ordinary people in emerging markets to bypass traditional banking systems. Bitcoin Day is a real-world application of that vision—lowering the barrier to entry so more people can truly “hold” Bitcoin for the first time.

An aggressively transformed Block

The Block making this judgment is already a company that has been thoroughly reshaped.

On February 26, 2026, Block announced layoffs of about 4,000 people—40% of the company’s total employees—reducing headcount from 10,000 to fewer than 6,000. After the layoff news was released, the stock price rose from the low-to-mid $50s to nearly $90.

In an internal memo, Jack Dorsey wrote that he wanted the company to “feel somewhat off and pared down.” Around the same time, the company’s internal AI tool Goose (built on the Model Context Protocol) was already responsible for about 90% of code submissions.

Before this round of slimming down, Block also shut down the decentralized Web project TBD that had been running for years, freeing up resources and putting everything into Bitcoin mining rigs and the Bitkey ecosystem. In August 2025, Block released Proto Rig, a modular Bitcoin mining rig. Its goal is to break Bitmain’s roughly 80% market share, alongside open-source mine management software Proto Fleet.

Block currently holds 8,883 BTC, with an average acquisition cost of about $33,000 per coin. It is currently showing an unrealized gain of roughly 103%. BTC is currently near $67,000. Compared with the peak of $126,000 at the end of 2025, it’s down by nearly half. Jack Dorsey didn’t reduce holdings at the peak, and he hasn’t stopped betting.

Community and market reaction

After the campaign was announced, the crypto community’s response was broadly positive, with many viewing it as “returning to Bitcoin’s original purpose.” Analysts pointed out that launching Bitcoin Day could significantly boost BTC purchase volumes within Cash App around April 6. In the short term, trading volume may see some fluctuations.

However, there are also criticisms, focusing on three points: the reward cap is only $80, which limits its appeal to true “newcomers”; participation requires an existing Cash App account, completely excluding non-U.S. users; in essence, it’s user-acquisition marketing for Block’s own products, which differs from the purely philanthropic nature of Andresen’s early effort.

But most observers believe that getting tens of thousands of real users to experience its products firsthand for $1 million is an extremely cost-effective marketing move for Block.

Back 16 years ago, when Andresen shut down the page, he couldn’t have known that those 19,700 coins would be worth so much. What he did—using today’s terms—is “user acquisition,” but his starting point wasn’t a business model; it was a belief. He believed the Bitcoin network needed real participants. What he could give was his own Bitcoin, and he gave it away.

The result was that, over the course of a few months, thousands of strangers got Bitcoin for the very first time—not by buying it, but by being given it. That’s exactly the core spirit behind Dorsey’s campaign.

Jack Dorsey’s Bitcoin Day campaign is an expression of belief spanning history and reality. It replants that “change the world with free Bitcoin” seed from 16 years ago into Block’s commercial soil.

Click to learn more about Rhythm BlockBeats recruiting positions

Welcome to join Rhythm BlockBeats’ official community:

Telegram subscription group: https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram discussion group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Twitter official account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia