Early on April 6th, Block tweeted on X: "The bitcoin faucet is back." The link led to btc.day. Jack Dorsey subsequently retweeted it.
"Faucet" is an old term in the crypto industry, and also an old way of doing things: getting tokens to your wallet for free. This culture dates back to 2010, when Bitcoin was less than two years old, one coin was worth a few cents, almost no one knew it existed, and no one knew what it would become.
Early developer Gavin Andresen built a rudimentary webpage on his computer using the Bitcoin he had in his pocket. He was one of the core developers in Satoshi Nakamoto's early circle, ranking among the top contributors to the code. But he created this page not to promote the project, nor to tell a story for fundraising. He simply felt that for this network to survive, more people needed to actually hold Bitcoin and personally experience this peer-to-peer payment network, rather than just discussing it in mailing lists.
The page has only one logic: you come, solve a CAPTCHA, 5 bitcoins are deposited into your wallet, and you're done. There's no minimum purchase requirement, no account binding, and no additional conditions. Anyone can visit, claim, and leave.
The page ran for several months, with Andresen continuously supplying it with his own BTC until it was almost depleted, at which point he shut it down. He sent out a total of approximately 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"
Returning 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 with Bitcoin as its core strategy.
Block's main products include:
- Cash App: A mobile payment and Bitcoin purchasing platform for ordinary users;
Square: A payment terminal and collection system for merchants;
- Bitkey: Block's self-developed Bitcoin hardware wallet, focusing on self-custody.
- Proto Rig: A modular Bitcoin mining machine launched by Block in August 2025;
Jack Dorsey is a staunch believer in Bitcoin and has publicly stated that "Bitcoin will become the native currency of the internet, and fiat currency will disappear in the future." All of his business ventures revolve around this belief.
Returning to the Block campaign itself, we can see that the rewards on the page are divided into three tiers: purchase more than $10 of BTC on the Cash App and get $5 back in BTC; pay Square merchants with Bitcoin and get $25 back in BTC; withdraw BTC to the Bitkey hardware wallet and get $50 back in BTC.
btc.day event page
If you do all three, you can get up to $80 worth of BTC.
The total reward pool is $1 million, and the event ends on April 10th on a first-come, first-served basis, while supplies last. It is only open to US residents aged 18 and over. One detail in the terms and conditions is that New York residents can buy BTC through the Cash App, but will not be eligible for the rewards for Square payments and Bitkey withdrawals. New York's crypto licensing rules exclude these two activities.
If we look at the three reward tiers side by side, the structure is very clear: behind each reward tier is a specific product line within the Block ecosystem.
The $5 tier activates users' first BTC purchase within the Cash App, establishing a buying habit;
The $25 tier encourages users to try using Bitcoin at physical merchants, which means the actual circulation of Bitcoin within the Square merchant network;
The highest reward is $50, which incentivizes users to transfer Bitcoin to their own Bitkey hardware wallet, promoting the concept of self-custody. This is precisely the step Block wants to take.
What Block bought with $1 million was a large number of real users' in-depth experience with its three product lines, which was more cost-effective than any advertising.
The campaign was launched when Bitcoin was priced at around $67,000, a nearly 50% pullback from its peak of $126,000 at the end of 2025. By proactively launching a "free BTC giveaway" campaign amidst a period of low market sentiment, the campaign aimed to attract hesitant users and demonstrate Block's strong confidence in Bitcoin's long-term value.
On the other hand, this also aligns with Jack Dorsey's vision of financial inclusion. Dorsey has long advocated that Bitcoin is not only an investment tool, but also a financial tool for ordinary people in emerging markets to bypass the traditional banking system. Bitcoin Day is a practical application of this idea, lowering the barrier to entry and allowing more people to truly "hold" Bitcoin for the first time.
Block's radical transformation
Block, the company that made this judgment, is now a completely transformed company.
On February 26, 2026, Block announced layoffs of approximately 4,000 employees, representing 40% of the company's total workforce, reducing it from 10,000 to less than 6,000. Following the announcement, the stock price rose from over $50 to nearly $90.
In an internal memo, Jack Dorsey wrote that he wanted the company to "lean up a bit, feel a little off." Around the same time, the company's internal AI tool, Goose (built on the Model Context Protocol), was already handling about 90% of the code commits.
Prior to this downsizing, Block also shut down its long-running decentralized web project TBD, freeing up resources to focus entirely on Bitcoin mining rigs and the Bitkey ecosystem. In August 2025, Block released Proto Rig, a modular Bitcoin mining rig, aiming to break Bitmain's approximately 80% market share, along with the open-source mining farm management software Proto Fleet.
Block currently holds 8,883 BTC, with an average purchase cost of approximately $33,000 per BTC, and a current unrealized profit of about 103%. BTC is currently around $67,000, nearly half the peak of $126,000 at the end of 2025. Jack Dorsey did not reduce his holdings at the peak, nor did he stop betting.
Community and market response
Following the announcement, the cryptocurrency community reacted generally positively, viewing the move as a "return to the roots of Bitcoin." Analysts pointed out that the launch of Bitcoin Day could trigger a significant increase in BTC purchases on the Cash App around April 6th, potentially causing short-term fluctuations in trading volume.
However, there are also criticisms, which focus on: the reward cap is only $80, which has limited appeal to genuine "newcomers"; participation requires an existing Cash App account, which completely closes off non-US users; and it is essentially a customer acquisition marketing campaign for Block's own product, which differs from Andresen's purely philanthropic approach back then.
However, most observers believe that spending $1 million to gain real product experience from hundreds of thousands of users is a highly cost-effective marketing strategy for Block.
Sixteen years ago, when Andresen closed the page, he had no idea those 19,700 coins would be worth so much. What he did would be called "user acquisition" in today's terms, but his motivation wasn't a business model; it was a belief. He believed the Bitcoin network needed real participants. All he could give was his own Bitcoin, and he gave it away.
The result was that within a few months, thousands of strangers acquired Bitcoin for the first time—not by buying it, but by receiving it from others. This is precisely the core spirit behind Dorsey's campaign.
Jack Dorsey's Bitcoin Day event was an expression of belief that spanned history and reality. It re-sowed the seed of "changing the world with free Bitcoin" from 16 years ago on the commercial soil of Block.
