Correction, April 29, 2021: This article was originally published suggesting that Julie Stitzel is a former regulator. Rather, she is a former vice president at a regulatory advocacy group. The article has been corrected to reflect that.
Payments giant Square, which supports Bitcoin development through its branch Square Crypto and offers BTC to retail investors through Cash App, has added Julie Stitzel, the former vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness, to lead its Bitcoin policy unit.
Stitzel will be leading teams within Cash App on the “evolving bitcoin policy sphere,” a Square spokesperson told CoinDesk.
“[Stitzel] will help Square advance our strategic and long-term thinking on crypto issues and will help drive education and engagement with outside parties who work in this space,” the spokesperson said.
Square wants to continue to “support broader adoption and awareness of bitcoin,” the firm’s CFO Amrita Ahuja said in an interview recently. Square has a significant amount of bitcoin held on its balance sheet, accumulating more than 8,000 BTC as of February.
Square’s hire is one in a growing trend of leaders in U.S. financial regulation getting more involved with Bitcoin recently. For instance, Brian Brooks — often referred to as the “CryptoComptroller — who led the Office of the Comptroller (OCC) under President Donal Trump, joined cryptocurrency exchange Binance’s U.S. arm as its new chief executive earlier this year.
Such regulatory experts entering the Bitcoin arena could possibly strengthen Bitcoin-focused company’s regulatory compliance as well as leverage their previous government experience in the much more lucrative private sector. Square, which is betting big on bitcoin, will evaluate its strategy “on an ongoing basis based as to how the bitcoin ecosystem evolves,” Ahuja told Forbes.