Block posted its strongest quarter in years on November 3, with profit nearly doubling and Cash App hitting its fastest growth pace since 2024. The report lands while bitcoin, once a reliable tailwind for the business, sits well below its 2025 highs.

Block reported third-quarter 2026 results on November 3, and the numbers were not close. Net revenue came in at $6.72 billion, gross profit rose 22% year-over-year to $3.24 billion, and adjusted diluted earnings per share hit $1.13, more than double the $0.54 Block posted a year earlier. Wall Street had priced in $1.03 a share on $6.58 billion in revenue, according to estimates reported by Yahoo Finance. Block beat both. Shares jumped more than 6% in premarket trading the next morning.

The headline number belongs to Cash App. Monthly transacting actives climbed to 60 million in September, up 4% year-over-year, which Block called its fastest growth pace since mid-2024. Cash App gross profit rose 27% to $2.07 billion. Underneath that growth sits a shift in what the app actually does for its users: primary banking customers, meaning people who treat Cash App as their main bank account, grew to 9.4 million from 8.3 million a year earlier, and roughly 28 million people now use the Cash App Card every month.

Lending is where the growth looks almost aggressive. Consumer loan originations through Cash App Borrow and Afterpay rose 40% year-over-year to $19 billion. That is Block betting its own balance sheet on the idea that Cash App users will keep borrowing small amounts and paying them back reliably, and so far the bet is paying off in volume terms. Block has not disclosed a deterioration in loss rates alongside that growth, which is the detail regulators and short sellers alike tend to watch most closely in consumer lending books.

Jack Dorsey built Cash App on top of a simple pitch: let people buy bitcoin alongside their regular banking. For years that made Block's results move with crypto prices. Bitcoin peaked near $126,000 in October 2025 and spent the following months sliding, falling below $100,000, then below $73,000 in January, then briefly under $60,000 in February, according to reporting from CoinDesk and other outlets tracking the decline. That is roughly half its peak value gone in under half a year.

Block filed with the OCC on September 8 to launch Builders Bank & Trust, a national trust bank meant to custody Cash App and Square customers' bitcoin and stablecoins directly, replacing more than 50 state licenses. The filing lands amid a broader 2026 rush of fintechs seeking federal trust charters, even as rivals like Coinbase strike bank... - block bank charter for bitcoin custody - cash app crypto assets federal trust bank

Block's third quarter shows a business that no longer needs bitcoin to cooperate. The growth driving this quarter, Cash App Borrow, Afterpay, primary banking, the Cash App Card, has nothing to do with crypto price action. Square's point-of-sale business told a similar story: gross payment volume reached $76.4 billion, up 14% year-over-year, which Block said was its strongest growth rate since the first quarter of 2023.

Dorsey's super-app thesis stands or falls on exactly this. A fintech that only grows when crypto is euphoric is just a bitcoin bet wearing a banking app's clothes. A fintech that grows 22% in gross profit while bitcoin is down nearly half from its highs is something closer to what Block has always claimed to be building.

Block also leaned into a metric it has pushed investors to adopt: the Rule of 40, a software-industry shorthand for whether a company balances growth with profitability. The company said it hit a "Rule of 46" this quarter, adding its 22% gross profit growth to a 29% adjusted operating income margin. It is Block's own framing, not an audited standard. But the underlying operating income figure is real: up 92% year-over-year to $923 million, straight from the shareholder letter filed with the SEC.

Block raised its full-year 2026 guidance on the back of the quarter. It now projects adjusted EPS of $4.15, above the $4.04 analysts had expected, and gross profit of roughly $12.6 billion, up 22%. There was an early look at 2027 too, with gross profit growth of at least 15% and adjusted operating income climbing 30% to about $4.575 billion.

Through the first nine months of the year, Block has bought back roughly $701 million of its own stock. That is a modest figure next to the kind of buyback programs its megacap peers run. Still, it signals management thinks the shares are worth owning at current prices.

None of this erases the risk sitting inside Cash App's loan book, or the fact that a meaningful slice of Block's revenue still depends on what bitcoin does next.

But for a quarter when the crypto market was falling apart, Block just posted the kind of numbers that make the bitcoin wrapper argument much harder to make.

Block waived Bitcoin processing fees through the end of 2026 and enrolled more than 4 million Square merchants, up from roughly 1 million already accepting it. Customers pay over the Lightning Network, and Square converts the payment to US dollars and settles it the same day by default. - how to accept bitcoin payments as merchant - bitcoin default payments for square sellers now

Also read: Robinhood's Prediction Markets Business Now Outearns Its Crypto Desk • PayPal's AI Checkout Bet Shows Up In Its Earnings For The First Time • Google still can't turn AI search into the ad machine it replaced

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