Did Square Acquire Square.com?

Square.com now forwarding to SquareUp.com, home of Square

In December of 2009, I wrote an article about how Twitter founder Jack Dorsey  launched a mobile payment service called Square, although the company was resigned to using  SquareUp.com for its website. In the last year, Square has grown in popularity, and I’ve seen a number of merchants using it to process credit card payments.

At the time of the launch, I wondered aloud why “someone with the capital resources such as Dorsey would launch a new brand on a domain name that is different from the actual brand.” Of course, the logical domain name for a company called Square would be Square.com, especially with trust being such an important factor when considering the importance of credit card processing.

I just received a tip that Square.com is now forwarding to SquareUp.com, although the Whois record still shows SQUARE ENIX HOLDINGS CO., LTD. as the registrant, which is unchanged in the last several years. This could possibly indicate a potential sale of the domain name, it could be that the company is leasing Square.com or paying for forwarding, or the registrant could simply be doing something nice to help the startup. Realistically, it could be any one of these things or possibly something I didn’t even think about.

One change I noticed is that the registrar status is listed as “Ok” instead of locked or transfer/delete prohibited, which may possibly indicate a transfer is in the works. Since the domain name transferred from Network Solutions to a registrar doing business as Onamae  sometime recently, it could simply be that the domain name was never re-locked.

I reached out to both parties to seek an answer and will update this if I hear back from either. If you have more information about this, please post it in the comment section.

Thanks to Bill Sweetman of YummyNames.com for the tip.