Block’s Third Quarter Puts Spotlight on FinTech Realities, Not Crypto Dreams

As the lines between financial services, consumer banking and commerce blur, sitting at the intersection of technology and money movement starts to look attractive.

At the enterprise level, at least. For Block, owner of Square and Cash App, the platform’s third quarter 2025 earnings highlighted some of the speed bumps being faced by Main Street businesses against today’s macro uncertainty.

While discretionary merchant categories (such as food and beverage) showed recovery in Square’s gross payments volume (GPV), the broader consumer environment remains uncertain. Block itself referenced a “dynamic environment” during Thursday’s (Nov. 6) third quarter investor call.

Still, the company posted impressive year-over-year (YoY) gross profit growth of 18%, up from 14% in the prior quarter, showcasing accelerating strength across both its two primary business segments, Cash App and Square.

With continued traction in Cash App actives, scaling to 58 million monthly users, and a disciplined approach to building the Square ecosystem around higher-value mid-market sellers, Block is hoping to continue proving its dual-network thesis in action.

But for a company at times linked to its founder’s crypto visions, Block’s results this quarter spoke more to the small business landscape of its core client audience.

The company missed analyst expectations and its share price fell around 13% in after-hours trading.

Read more: Block Pushes Past Payments Into Bitcoin, Banking and BNPL 

Block announced revenue of $6.11 billion for the quarter ended Q3 2025, a mark that fell short of many analyst models.

Still, while Square’s gross profit growth slowed slightly to 9% year over year, its GPV tells a compelling strategic story.

Total Square GPV rose 12% YoY, driven by traction in international markets, which grew 26% compared to 9% in the United States. But perhaps more importantly, Square’s mix is changing. GPV from mid-market sellers — those generating more than $500,000 in annualized GPV — now accounts for 45% of total GPV, up from 41% two years ago. This reveals execution against one of Square’s strategies: upmarket expansion.

This pivot signals a move away from Square’s original DNA as a small merchant enabler, toward a sturdier identity as a business operating platform that intersects commerce, customer relationships, and financial services. The company continues to add functionality, both productively and through AI-driven automation, to make seller operations increasingly turnkey.

Read more: Block’s Chief Risk Officer Says AI Is Leading the Fight Against Scams 

What may be most telling is that Block is not just growing through the tailwinds of consumer digitization, but through disciplined architecture of what management calls “integrated ecosystems.”

Each arm of the business bolsters the others: Cash App users spend through Square merchants; Square’s enterprise-grade capabilities attract larger sellers, who bring customers back into the Cash App universe; blockchains strengthen lending insights; Afterpay automates point-of-sale retail finance.

If anything, Block’s Q3 reinforces the notion that the future of financial service providers will be less about siloed products and more about networked ecosystems that distribute value dynamically across users — consumer or merchant, buyer or seller.

The company is also leaning heavily into artificial intelligence (AI) to supercharge that operating system. Automated fraud detection, AI-generated insights into customer spend, and predictive workforce scheduling all reflect Block’s bet that software intelligence will become the new moat in FinTech. In other words: Square is not just reacting to demand from larger businesses, it is shaping it.

Even with crypto fading into the background — bitcoin revenue fell again — Cash App’s core growth narrative remains firmly tied to its FinTech functionality, not its speculative trading volume. That subtle shift speaks volumes: Block is not chasing market froth; it’s building infrastructure.

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