Square Launches $Cashtag: Your Free URL to Accept Money

When your hashtag goes viral, it means that your Twitter account is blowing up. Now, when your $Cashtag goes viral, it’ll mean that your bank account is blowing up.

This is the future that online money-sending service Square is envisioning with its new launch of personalized, cash-accepting URLs, called $Cashtags.

You can now visit cash.me to reserve your own $Cashtag, which is essentially a username for the service. As with Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, tacking that username (or $Cashtag) at the end of the Square Cash website URL will bring visitors to your personal page. From there, those who owe you green can simply type in the amount and click “Pay.” The money is exchanged between associated debit accounts.

You can also type someone’s $Cashtag into the Square Cash app and send money that way.

Done and done.

The new Web-centric version of the formerly email- and app-based Square Cash is still more stripped down than competing services.

Venmo, which also offers customers a free, personal URL, packs in a Facebook-like money stream showing which friends of yours gave money to whom and for what reason. And PayPal and Google Wallet, in addition to providing money-exchange options between two parties, can be used for paying at online shops as well.

With Cash’s launch of $Cashtags, Square has brought a new ability to pay businesses or charities via the service, charging a fee of only 1.5 percent for transactions of that type. Square’s popular Square Reader mobile credit card service currently charges 2.75 percent of each swipe.

There is, however, no fee to send money to nonbusiness $Cashtags. Which means to say that, with your help, I’m hoping to see my $Cashtag ($danielwbean) start trending big. Thanks in advance.

Email me at danbean@yahoo-inc.com. Follow me on Twitter at @danielwbean.