Cash App Investing

I was the founding server engineer of Cash App Investing LLC, a new business unit created within Cash App. We built a fully fledged self-directed trading product from MVP to serving 8+ million customers.

The Problem

According to Gallop, in 2018, only 55% of Americans owned stock.

Similarly a study from Blackrock showed that 57% out of 27,000 interviewees did not own stock.

That means roughly half of the population did not allocate their wealth in assets, and instead kept their money in either cash under their beds or a low interest-rate savings account. That’s a HUGE loss in this inflationary world we live in!

According to our customers, stocks were confusing and intimidating. They also didn’t have enough funds to buy AAPL or AMZN which costed over $1000/share. This is why we introduced fractional share investing in Cash App.

Our Mission

We wanted to provide the simplest and easiest product for customers to get started with investing and grow and manage their wealth. We wanted to target the underserved novice investor population. That’s why we built Cash App Investing.

Demo

My main focus was backend development. These are the user-facing features I worked on:

• Equity & bitcoin pricing services
• Portfolios performance, gain/loss & cost basis calculations
• Market & limit order fulfillment
• Market data metrics

Other stuff behind the scenes:

• Built back office tooling for brokerage operations
• Handled corporate actions
• Built an end-to-end testing framework
• Migrated over 10k QPS out of our legacy monolith service

Reviews 😄

https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/12/10/cash-app-investing-generations-block-buy/

Even among baby boomers, Cash App remains the most popular choice for investing, with 15% choosing Cash App. Nonetheless, it shows Cash App’s success in making its app user-friendly for all ages.