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Comment by xkjkls | Hacker News Reader

Square, a company with many years headstart, trades at a high multiple, and has many more integration points into commerce than WhatsApp does currently, trades at a market cap of $27 billion.

Given that Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion, trying a low probability strategy of trying to compete for market share where the best case scenario is $27 billion in value seems foolish.

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Square and Whatsapp are basically not comparable business entities.

If WhatsApp decided to move to payments, it is the closest analog.

No, square is fundamentally geared towards long-tail consumer retail, not peer-to-peer payments, and it's very credit card oriented. They still would not even be comparable.

What is the Cash app then?

An okay alternative to Venmo.

The UI is definitely worse (IMO) and they've done a piss poor job at tying users to identities more than using phone numbers. Nobody I know uses Cash App except in exceptional cases. I have to double and triple check usernames to make sure I'm not sending money to the wrong person.

The Cash app is a pretty small percentage of Square's revenue. Square isn't much more than a credit card processor for small businesses IMO.

Wouldn’t the closest analog be WeChat? Square isn’t a messaging platform.

I was referencing the guy above who suggested WhatsApp become a commerce platform, and why that is hard.

WeChat definitely does many of those things, but that’s far from it’s only monetization Model

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