'Only $250K?' Jack Dorsey Prods Tether Over Donation to Support Bitcoin Devs

Sometimes it can be easier to say nothing at all. 

This week, stablecoin giant Tether announced a $250,000 donation to OpenSats to support Bitcoin developers—only for one of the world’s best-known programmers (and Bitcoin maximalists) to publicly chastise the size of the gift. 

Twitter co-founder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey lampooned the donation Thursday on X, shortly after it was touted by Tether’s CEO, Paolo Ardoino.

“Why only $250K?” Dorsey replied curtly to Ardoino.

Tether is one of the crypto industry’s most profitable companies. The USDT issuer, which posted a $13 billion profit last year, is reportedly seeking a $500 billion valuation in talks with potential investors. 

Tether said its donation to OpenSats, which funds the development of free and open-source Bitcoin software, will support the nonprofit’s operations and grant-making efforts.

A representative for the company did not respond to Decrypt’s request for comment on Dorsey’s comment, which Ardoino did not respond publicly to.

Shortly after the comment was made, however, another X user pressed Dorsey on his own financial commitment to the cause of protecting Bitcoin developers, questioning how much he had donated.

The entrepreneur immediately shot back: “Over $21 million. You?”

Indeed, OpenSats received a $21 million donation from Dorsey’s Start Small initiative in 2024. The tech billionaire has been an outspoken advocate for decentralized technology and censorship resistance for years, and one of the most famous Bitcoin backers around.

But even Dorsey was not without his detractors. Udi Wertheimer, creator of popular Bitcoin Ordinals project Taproots Wizards, at first took Dorsey’s side in the scuffle—but then turned on the Twitter inventor.

“No one should go into a pissing match with Jack when it comes to funding open-source Bitcoin development,” Wertheimer said.

The Bitcoiner went on, though, to lambast Dorsey for his investments in Ocean, a Bitcoin mining pool that previously caught heat for discouraging the processing of non-financial transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain, including the creation of NFT-like Ordinals.

“You should subtract from that number whatever the size of your Ocean investment was,” Wertheimer said of Dorsey’s philanthropic contributions. “Sadly, that capital is being actively deployed to slow down development.”

Alas, on Crypto Twitter, nobody’s perfect.