How Block is turning Square and Cash App into one local growth network
- Block has connected Square’s seller network with Cash App’s consumer base via Neighborhoods, giving local businesses a way to turn discovery into direct orders, customer relationships, and potentially repeat visits.
- Neighborhoods is designed to bypass the traditional marketplace model. Its growth will depend on whether Cash App can generate meaningful customer demand and repeat spending without adding another layer of cost for sellers.
Local sellers can make payments easier to accept, but finding new customers and giving them a reason to return is a challenge. Marketplaces can bring demand, but sellers may have to contend with commissions, competition for visibility, and separate tools for managing customer relationships.
Block, the parent company of Square and Cash App, saw this gap between its seller and consumer networks. In the last quarter of 2025, it brought the two networks together through Neighborhoods, a feature in Cash App. It lets customers discover and follow local businesses that use Square, place orders through Cash App, and earn Local Cash rewards that encourage them to return.
Block said in August 2026 that Neighborhoods had added 30,000 sellers, nearly ten times the number in June. As of June 2026, participating sellers represented $1 billion in annualized gross payment volume, up more than 220% from March. Block also reported that spending by followers accounted for an average of 10% of sellers’ gross payment volume after three quarters on the platform.
Tearsheet Managing Editor Sara Khairi spoke with Owen Jennings, Block’s Business Lead, about why the company connected Square and Cash App now after all these years, how Neighborhoods changes the economics of customer acquisition and retention for local sellers, and why Block describes it as an “anti-marketplace.”
Q: What were the biggest barriers – technical, organizational, data-related, or otherwise – to connecting Square and Cash App, and what changed that allowed Neighborhoods to happen now?
Owen Jennings, Block: Connecting Square and Cash App meant bringing together our largest networks while making the experience simple for sellers and customers. For sellers, the experience needed to work through the Square tools they already use. And for customers, it needed to create a meaningful reason to engage with local businesses through Cash App.
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