California: PayPal has announced to support cryptocurrencies for the first time, allowing any PayPal account holder to store, buy, and sell popular virtual currencies starting later this year.
PayPal
According to The Verge, the announcement makes PayPal arguably the most significant company in the financial tech sector to adopt support for virtual currencies.
Earlier, PayPal competitor Square launched support for bitcoin back in 2018 through its Cash app (Square also purchased $50 million worth of bitcoin earlier this month), but now PayPal is going further in supporting bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin.PayPal also plans to extend support to its money-sending subsidiary Venmo and international markets starting early next year. For now, PayPal plans to launch digital currency support for US users in the coming weeks, added The Verge.
Major digital wallet
The move will make PayPal a major digital wallet as well as a cryptocurrency exchange, and the result could substantially increase the potential adoption of cryptocurrencies among everyday users and online merchants.
“The shift to digital forms of currencies is inevitable, bringing with it clear advantages in terms of financial inclusion and access; efficiency, speed and resilience of the payments system; and the ability for governments to disburse funds to citizens quickly,” PayPal CEO Dan Schulman said in a statement. “Our global reach, digital payments expertise, two-sided network, and rigorous security and compliance controls provide us with the opportunity, and the responsibility, to help facilitate the understanding, redemption and interoperability of these new instruments of exchange.”
Schulman also said PayPal is “eager to work with central banks and regulators around the world” in supporting cryptocurrency.
PayPal, for now, is restricting users from purchasing cryptocurrencies on its own platform, and existing digital coin owners can not transfer the contents of other digital wallets over to PayPal’s.