Paypal Gives the Opportunity to Buy and Sell Cryptocurrency
One of the world's largest online payment networks, PayPal, today announced its embrace of cryptocurrencies which will encourage consumers to purchase, sell and store crypto on digital wallets starting with the United States.
PayPal Makes Crypto Payments Worldwide
This Wednesday PayPal Holdings Inc. revealed that it is opening the sluice gates for the cryptocurrency industry, allowing users to legitimately purchase, sell and store crypto coins through the company's US online wallets first and then spread to the rest of the planet.
PayPal customers in particular jurisdictions will be allowed to use cryptocurrencies to purchase 26 million pre-approved merchants from the company starting in early 2021, explained the company in an official statement.
US customers will launch crypto transactions within few weeks and the company plans to extend further to Venmo - the mobile payments service PayPal .
PayPal's President and Chief Executive Dan Schulman said the move is a reference to what PayPal expects to eventually become a surge of digital currencies by central banks (CBDC) and other corporate virtual coins.
For months now, China has been piloting digital currency experiments while the European Union and the United States have become more cautious in their approaches. The chairman of the United States Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, recently reported that the United States is slipping behind in CBDC production and acceptance.
After extended cooperation with central banks, PayPal's decision to accept cryptocurrency comes to formulate a way for the widespread introduction of digital currencies and how PayPal can further control this development, Schulman clarified.
PayPal is not the first company to propose embracing digital currency, as other Fintech companies introduced a similar functionality. These businesses include Robinhood Markets Inc. and Square Inc., but none of those options has the same impact and scope as PayPal.
Tackling Asset Uncertainty
Although this is a big move from the payment processor, the market instability in cryptocurrencies remains an underlying challenge that scares off shoppers and retailers from embracing these digital assets more widely.
However, the organization will use reserve currencies for the final balance, such as US dollars, to ensure consistency, such that retailers collect payments in a common central bank currency and not cryptography. In the meantime, this is still not the first time PayPal has flirted with cryptocurrency.
Back in 2019, Facebook revealed its own project for crypto-currency, Libra, which drew PayPal attention. Yet in October 2019, PayPal dropped out of the project.
PayPal has also obtained a conditional license from the New York State Financial Services Department, which will facilitate funding for many crypto assets, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, and Litecoin.
