Cash App: Cashtags, Glow-in-the-Dark Cards and an $80 Million AML Fine

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Cash App launched in October 2013 as Square Cash, created by Jack Dorsey and Brian Grassadonia at Square, now Block. It did one thing: let people send up to $2,500 a week to each other by email or text using a linked debit card, without routing numbers or three-day holds. In 2015 it opened to businesses and introduced the $cashtag, a public username for receiving money. From 2016 to 2021 it added a customizable Cash Card, Bitcoin trading in 2018, free fractional stock trading in 2019, tax filing after buying Credit Karma Tax for $50 million in 2020, and accounts for teens 13 and up in 2021. In 2024 it had 57 million monthly active users, over $280 billion in annual inflows and $16.25 billion in revenue.

Revenue comes from instant transfer fees of 0.5 to 1.75 percent, $2 ATM fees without direct deposit, a 2.75 percent business fee, Bitcoin spreads and interest on deposits, plus a 4.5 percent savings yield tied to $300 monthly direct deposits. Its four-week loans of $20 to $200 carry a flat 5 percent fee, over 65 percent annualized. A 2022 Pew Research Center report found 26 percent of U.S. adults had used it, and it became the preferred payment app for lower-income adults. Scams flourished because payments are hard to reverse. Block settled a $15 million class action over 2021 and 2023 data breaches in August 2024 and agreed in January 2025 to an $80 million fine to 48 state regulators over anti-money laundering policies, and it exited Europe, dropped Australia and left the UK in late 2024.

• Cash App has been mentioned in over 200 hip hop songs and partnered with Travis Scott, Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B.
• Weekly Cash App Friday giveaways on Twitter pay out $10,000 to $50,000.
• By 2018 it had passed Venmo with 33.5 million cumulative downloads.
• One man lost $24,000 to scammers posing as Cash App support, and another used a viral Waffle House video to collect donations.
• A multi-day outage in September 2023 left users unable to pay or use their Cash Cards.