When you attempt to comprehend Block, Inc., the company behind XYZ stock, a certain point keeps coming up. In February 2026, Block announced that it was laying off over 4,000 of its 10,000 employees. Cutting almost half of your workforce seems like the kind of announcement that would make investors flee. Rather, the next day, shares increased by 24%. That response reveals something significant about Block as well as the peculiar, high-stakes reasoning behind contemporary fintech investing.
It’s important to keep in mind where it all began. The man who co-founded Twitter, Jack Dorsey, witnessed his friend Jim McKelvey lose a $2,000 sale of glass faucets in 2009 due to his inability to take credit cards. That brief, annoying incident in a St. Louis workshop served as the inspiration for the company that now handles $241 billion in payments annually. It’s funny how much weight one lost sale can have.
| Field | Details |
|---|---|
| Full Name | Block, Inc. |
| Former Name | Square, Inc. |
| Stock Ticker | NYSE: XYZ (formerly SQ) |
| Founded | 2009 |
| Founders | Jack Dorsey, Jim McKelvey |
| Headquarters | Oakland, California, USA |
| Industry | Financial Technology (Fintech) |
| Key Products | Square POS, Cash App, Afterpay, Bitkey, Proto (Bitcoin mining) |
| Annual Payment Volume | $241 billion (2024) |
| Users Served | 57 million consumers, 4 million sellers |
| S&P 500 Addition | July 23, 2025 |
| Official Website | block.xyz |
The business that emerged from that incident took on multiple identities. The first was Square, the small white card reader that appeared at farmers’ markets and food trucks across the United States. Then came Cash App, which debuted in 2013 as a peer-to-peer payment tool and, by 2018, had surpassed PayPal and Venmo in the Apple App Store to become one of the nation’s most downloaded finance apps.
Acquisitions came next: Tidal, the music streaming service Jay-Z once supported; Afterpay, the Australian buy-now-pay-later platform; and finally, a complete rebranding to Block in December 2021. In January 2025, the ticker changed from SQ to XYZ. Every change sparked curiosity, and the doubters were right every time.
Earlier this year, Jim Cramer, who never holds back, expressed it vividly on Squawk on the Street. He listed the company’s numerous name changes, including Square, X, XYZ, and Block, and proposed that they simply rename the ticker “SELL.” The audience chuckled. Since then, the stock has increased by 20%. To put it mildly, Cramer has a complicated history when it comes to calls like this one.
The year has been truly turbulent for XYZ stock. In the days leading up to its inclusion in the S&P 500 in late July 2025, shares increased 12%. This achievement provided the company with the institutional legitimacy it had been pursuing for years. The stock fell 7.7% in a single session after the third-quarter earnings report was released in November.
In contrast to analyst expectations of $6.31 billion, revenue came in at $6.1 billion. The $0.54 adjusted earnings fell short of the $0.67 projection. The market wasn’t entirely satisfied with the management’s explanations, which included increased hardware sales and a change in payment processing partners. Up until late 2025, shares had dropped by about 11%.
When the fourth quarter came around, the narrative changed once more. At $2.87 billion, gross profit increased 24% from the previous year. With consumer lending originations rising 69% year over year and Cash App Borrow, a short-term credit product, surging an almost unbelievable 223% compared to the same period in 2024, Cash App’s ecosystem alone drove 33% growth.
The amount of adjusted EBITDA was $930 million. Block increased its 2026 forecast, aiming for a 26% margin of $12.2 billion in gross profit and $3.2 billion in adjusted operating income. The stock increased 22% on earnings night due to after-hours trading. The numbers are difficult to dispute on their face, but it’s still unclear if that enthusiasm fully accounts for the execution risk involved.
Even by Silicon Valley standards, the restructuring at the heart of all of this is exceptionally aggressive. It takes a degree of confidence in AI-driven automation that not all businesses in this industry can legitimately claim in order to reduce headcount by more than 40%, from about 10,000 employees to less than 6,000, while also increasing profit guidance. Block is wagering that it can use AI systems to replace a sizable amount of engineering, customer service, and go-to-market work.
The wager appears to be credible, according to Morgan Stanley, which reaffirmed its Overweight rating with a $93 price target in March 2026. Around the same time, Oppenheimer increased its own target from $85 to $89, pointing to the restructuring as a means of achieving earnings significantly higher than the current consensus.
What’s intriguing—and possibly underestimated—is that Block’s original product, Square, is still quietly maintaining its position. Square was officially recognized as the top point-of-sale system provider in the United States in May 2024. In the most recent quarter, Square’s gross payment volume reached $65 billion, with a 24% increase in international GPV.
That’s not insignificant for a product that started out as a square-shaped card reader in a converted St. Louis office. The Square ecosystem continues to thrive outside the modern Oakland headquarters in coffee shops, boutiques, and pop-up markets across the nation, with small business owners tapping screens that feed into a massive financial machine.
The XYZ stock story is further complicated by Block’s aspirations for bitcoin. In July 2024, the company signed a large-scale hardware agreement with miner Core Scientific, and it has been developing its own three-nanometer bitcoin mining chip. Its self-custody bitcoin wallet, Bitkey, was listed as one of the top inventions of 2024 by TIME.
Although Dorsey has never been subtle about his belief in the currency’s future, it’s possible that the bitcoin side of the business is still more of a long-term positioning play than a short-term earnings driver. The company is shaped by this conviction in both obvious and subtle ways.
Perhaps what makes XYZ stock intriguing is how genuinely uncertain its future is. It’s worth keeping an eye on a company that is reducing its workforce by 40% while reporting record Cash App growth and upward trajectory. Whether Block’s AI-driven efficiency truly materializes at the margins, whether Cash App can expand its lending without taking on credit risk that bites back, and whether the bitcoin mining initiative ever becomes a significant revenue stream are all legitimate questions that currently lack clear answers.
As this develops, there’s a feeling that Block is either actually becoming more robust and leaner, or it’s managing a very impressive-looking pivot that hasn’t yet been put to the test. As of right now, it appears that the market is favoring the former.