Jack Dorsey's Block made its clearest statement yet about where Cash App draws the age line on cryptocurrency. On Tuesday, April 21, the company opened Cash App to children as young as six with a new "managed accounts" product — one that pays interest, runs under parental supervision, and deliberately excludes Bitcoin for the youngest tier.
The new accounts, available to users aged 6 to 12, pay 3.25 per cent annual interest on savings balances, according to details confirmed by Decrypt and TheStreet. Parents retain full authority over the account, including approving or declining transfers to and from up to five trusted contacts they pre-select. Every incoming and outgoing flow is gated through the parent's Cash App profile, a structural safeguard that closely mirrors what Greenlight and GoHenry pioneered in the teen segment.
The sponsored teen accounts for users aged 13 to 17, which Cash App has operated for years, are unaffected. On that tier, Bitcoin remains an optional feature that parents can enable or block. The difference with the new product is unambiguous: the under-13 experience has no path to crypto at all.
"Cash App serves more than 5 million teens on a monthly basis, and we've heard from parents that they want to start building good money habits with their kids even earlier," Owen Jennings, Block Executive Officer and Head of Business, said in the company's announcement. "We built managed accounts to give kids access to real financial tools and experiences while keeping parents fully involved."
The Bitcoin exclusion is where the product tells the more interesting corporate story. Cash App built a meaningful share of Block's revenue off Bitcoin transactions — the service was one of the first large US payments apps to offer direct BTC buying, selling and withdrawal to self-custody wallets. Dorsey has long positioned Bitcoin as a mission-level commitment rather than a feature. Choosing not to extend that feature to a tier explicitly designed for 6-year-olds is a deliberate product call, not an engineering limitation.
The absence of an explicit rationale in the company's announcement leaves room for interpretation. The most defensible reading is regulatory: US and state-level consumer finance authorities have shown consistently little appetite for cryptocurrency products marketed to minors, and the optics of a 7-year-old holding Bitcoin inside a parent-supervised account would invite scrutiny that Block has, in recent years, been working hard to reduce. The product-safety reading is similar — volatility in Bitcoin of the magnitude seen in 2026's swings is difficult to justify inside a "building good money habits" frame.
The market positioning angle is also plain. Cash App now has five million monthly active teens, a user base that many adjacent fintech players would consider structurally defensible. By opening the door to 6- to 12-year-olds and keeping parents firmly in the control seat, Block extends the onboarding runway by six to seven years. A child who has used Cash App to save pocket money at age eight is unusually likely to keep the adult product at eighteen. Bitcoin can be reintroduced later, once the user reaches an age where the feature is commercially and regulatorily comfortable.
The competitive read-through is felt most obviously at Greenlight, GoHenry and Acorns' Early product, all of which target similar age bands but without the underlying payments network effects of a Cash App. Greenlight's standalone product model requires a direct subscription fee; Cash App's managed accounts sit inside a consumer banking app with hundreds of millions of users and no incremental CAC beyond the existing parent relationship. The unit economics of that are substantially different.
For the broader fintech-in-kids category, the 3.25 per cent interest rate is the other headline. It compares favourably with many bank-led teen savings products that continue to pay legacy-level yields, and it lands at a moment when most US high-yield accounts are still priced well above that level. The rate is competitive enough to appear generous without being so high as to require continuous funding-margin management — a balance Cash App has historically executed well.
The strategic message from Dorsey's camp is that Block sees age 6 as the new front line for customer acquisition in consumer finance, and that cryptocurrency belongs on a clearly later step in that journey. That is a notable posture from a company whose Bitcoin commitments — from custody tooling to hashrate infrastructure — are among the most public in US fintech. Kids do not get Bitcoin. They get compound interest and a parent-supervised money habit. For now, that is the Cash App answer.