On April 6th, early in the morning, Block tweeted on X: "The bitcoin faucet is back." The link pointed to btc.day. Jack Dorsey then retweeted it.

“Faucet” is an old term in the crypto industry and a very old way of doing things: receiving tokens for free into a wallet. This culture can be traced back to 2010, when Bitcoin had only been born for less than two years, worth a few cents at that time, and almost no one knew of its existence, nor did anyone know what it would eventually become.

Early developer Gavin Andresen set up a simple webpage on his computer using his own BTC. He was one of the core developers in Satoshi Nakamoto's early circle, with code contributions ranking high. But he created this page not for project promotion or fundraising storytelling. He simply felt that for this network to survive, more people needed to genuinely hold Bitcoin and experience this peer-to-peer payment network, rather than just discussing it in email lists.

The logic of the page was straightforward: you come, solve a captcha, 5 bitcoins go into your wallet, done. There was no minimum purchase requirement, no account binding, and no additional conditions. Anyone could visit, take, and leave.

The page ran for a few months, with Andresen supplying the BTC until it was nearly depleted, at which point he shut it down. He had distributed about 19,700 BTC in total.

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

This “faucet” culture has not left the crypto industry.

“Faucet Is Back”

Back to Jack Dorsey, we all know he is the co-founder of Twitter (now X), but in recent years he has completely shifted his focus to Block, formerly Square, a fintech company centered around Bitcoin as its core strategy.

The main products under Block include:

- Cash App: A mobile payment and Bitcoin purchasing platform for ordinary users;

- Square: A payment terminal and receipt system for merchants;

- Bitkey: Block's self-developed Bitcoin hardware wallet, focusing on self-custody;

- Proto Rig: A modular Bitcoin miner launched by Block in August 2025;

Jack Dorsey himself is a staunch Bitcoin believer and has openly stated: "Bitcoin will become the native currency of the internet, and fiat currency will eventually disappear." All his business arrangements revolve around this belief.

Returning to Block's activity itself, we can find that the rewards on the page are divided into three tiers: purchase over $10 of BTC via Cash App, receive $5 in BTC; pay Square merchants with Bitcoin, receive $25 in BTC; withdraw BTC to Bitkey hardware wallet, receive $50 in BTC.

btc.day event page

If all three tasks are completed, up to $80 in BTC can be earned.

The total reward pool is $1 million, the event ends on April 10, first come, first served, and once it's gone, it's gone, limited to U.S. residents aged 18 and over. One detail in the terms states: New York residents can buy BTC on Cash App, but cannot qualify for the rewards from Square payments and Bitkey withdrawals. The cryptocurrency licensing rules in New York prevent these two actions.

We can observe the three tiers of rewards side by side, and the structure is clear, with each tier of reward corresponding to a specific product line within the Block ecosystem:

The $5 tier incentivizes users to make their first BTC purchase in Cash App, establishing a buying habit;

The $25 tier encourages users to try using Bitcoin for purchases at physical merchants, which is the actual circulation of Bitcoin within the Square merchant network;

And the highest $50 reward motivates users to transfer Bitcoin to their own controlled Bitkey hardware wallet, promoting the concept of self-custody. This is precisely the step Block wants to promote the most.

What Block gains for its $1 million is extensive real user exposure to its three product lines, which is more cost-effective than any advertisement.

The activity launched when the price of Bitcoin was around $67,000, having recently adjusted nearly 50% from the peak of $126,000 at the end of 2025. Taking the initiative to launch a "free BTC giveaway" campaign amid market sentiment being low serves to attract onlookers on one hand, and also conveys Block's strong confidence in Bitcoin's long-term value to the market.

On the other hand, this also aligns with Jack Dorsey’s vision of inclusive finance. Jack Dorsey has long argued that Bitcoin is not just an investment tool, but a financial tool for ordinary people in emerging markets to bypass the traditional banking system. Bitcoin Day is an embodiment of this concept, lowering the entry barriers and allowing more people to truly "hold" Bitcoin for the first time.

The Radical Transformation of Block

And the Block that made this judgment has already been a completely transformed company.

On February 26, 2026, Block announced it would lay off about 4,000 employees, accounting for 40% of its total workforce, reducing from 10,000 to less than 6,000. After the layoff news was released, the stock price rose from over $50 to nearly $90.

In an internal letter, Jack Dorsey wrote that he wanted the company to "feel a bit strange in being streamlined." At the same time, the internal AI tool Goose (built on the Model Context Protocol) was already responsible for about 90% of code submissions.

Before this slimming down, Block had also shut down the long-running decentralized web project TBD, reallocating resources entirely to Bitcoin miners and the Bitkey ecosystem. In August 2025, Block released Proto Rig, a modular Bitcoin miner aimed at breaking Bitmain's approximately 80% market share, along with an open-source mining farm management software called Proto Fleet.

Block currently holds 8,883 BTC, with an average purchase cost of about $33,000 per coin, currently showing a paper profit of about 103%. BTC is now around $67,000, down nearly half from the peak of $126,000 at the end of 2025. Jack Dorsey did not reduce his holdings at the peak nor did he stop his bets.

Community and Market Reactions

After the event announcement, the cryptocurrency community responded positively, viewing this move as a "return to the original intent of Bitcoin." Analysts pointed out that the launch of Bitcoin Day might lead to a significant increase in BTC purchases within Cash App around April 6th, possibly resulting in short-term trading volume fluctuations.

However, there have also been critical voices, focusing on: the reward cap of only $80 has limited appeal to genuine "newcomers"; the participation requirement necessitates an existing Cash App account, completely excluding non-U.S. users; essentially it is a customer acquisition marketing for Block's own products, differing from Andresen's original intention of pure public benefit.

But the majority of observers believe that gaining hundreds of thousands of users with real product experiences for $1 million is highly cost-effective marketing for Block.

Going back 16 years, when Andresen shut down the page, he did not know that those 19,700 would be worth so much. What he did can be summed up in today's terms as “user acquisition,” but his original motivation was not a business model, but a belief. He believed the Bitcoin network needed real participants. What he could offer was his own bitcoins, and he gave them away.

The result was that thousands of strangers came to own Bitcoin for the first time within a few months, not by purchasing, but as gifts from others. This is exactly the core spirit from which Dorsey’s current activity draws.

Jack Dorsey’s Bitcoin Day activity is a declaration of belief that spans history and reality. It has re-seeded the idea of "changing the world with free bitcoins" from 16 years ago back into the commercial soil of Block.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。