23 Jun 2020 Arjun Agarwal
PayPal To Offer Direct Cryptocurrency Sales
PayPal, which is among the leading fintech giants on the market is topping up their crypto game. PayPal and Venmo, which is a subsidiary to PayPal, are rumored to be building some sort of a built-in wallet functionality, allowing users to buy, sell and store their cryptocurrency assets directly from the two providers. As of now, the PayPal functionalities allow an alternative option for withdrawing funds from exchanges, like Coinbase for example.
“It’s quite possible that PayPal will roll out some sort of a native wallet functionality to both Venmo and PayPal in order to cash out on cryptocurrencies, or buy cryptos directly, without going to exchanges”, a well-informed insider stated.
However, it is still unclear how many exchanges and which of the exchanges may be involved in the PayPal project. The number of supported cryptocurrencies also remains unclear.
The news about PayPal joining the crypto bandwagon was confirmed by a second source, stating that “PayPal may roll out such functionalities in the next three months, if not sooner”. PayPal is still not making any official statements on that topic.
Meanwhile, PayPal’s has been on the hunt for blockchain experts. The company posted several job offerings for its Blockchain Research Group, which partly confirms the rumours. The job offers are split evenly – four in the offices in San Jose and four in Singapore. PayPal also managed to get vital experience by joining, and later resigning from Facebook’s Libra stablecoin project. Sri Shivananda, PayPal’s Chief Technology Officer, stated that the company “considers its own view and perspective on the blockchain technology sector to find out ways to enhance the concept of PayPal becoming an open payments platform, serving everyone digitally”.
“We firmly believe in the vast potential that blockchain technology carries. Currency digitalization is a matter of time, not of possibility.” Shivananda concluded.
Furthermore, revenue from fintech apps, which offer crypto, are skyrocketing. For example, Twitter’s payment subsidiary Square began accepting Bitcoin purchases in the middle of 2018. Square’s Cash app published a report in May, citing $306 million in Bitcoin revenue in Q1 of 2020. Interestingly, the revenue from Bitcoin exceeded the $222 million fiat revenue Square received during the first quarter of 2020.
Revolut and Robinhood also marked an increase in crypto revenues, while PayPal’s CEO Dan Schulman stated his plans for enforcing aggressive monetization policies for Venmo and diversifying its revenue streams.
Cryptocurrency Crypto Market crypto market monitoring cryptocurrencies exchange buy cryptocurrency news paypal cryptocurrency bitcoin cashout exchange bitcoin to paypal buy crypto digital asset exchange ethereum to paypal digital Exchanges Payments
