Square powered Snapchat’s Snapcash payment system.
Snapcash was a peer-to-peer payment feature introduced by Snapchat in November 2014. It let users send and receive money through private messages, but Snapchat did not build the payments infrastructure entirely on its own. Square, the payments company co-founded by Jack Dorsey, supplied the technology and processing partnership behind the service.
The arrangement connected Snapchat’s messaging audience with Square’s payments platform. Users could link a debit card and send money inside a Snapchat conversation, making Snapcash an early example of social messaging expanding into financial services.
The answer is sometimes confused with Venmo or PayPal because those services also support person-to-person transfers. Stripe is another plausible-sounding distractor because it provides online payment infrastructure, but it was not the company identified with Snapcash’s launch. Snapchat eventually discontinued Snapcash in 2018, as the feature faced competition from dedicated payment apps and broader platform changes.