According to a recent official announcement, PayPal is going to start supporting cryptocurrency for the first time, which means that all PayPal account holders will be able to carry out financial activities with popular virtual currencies, including storing, buying, and selling. The service will be available later this year.
This move has definitely made PayPal the topmost significant company in the financial tech sector to adopt support for virtual currencies.
PayPal’s competitor service Square launched support for Bitcoin in 2018, however PayPal is not only going to support Bitcoin, but other virtual currencies like Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin as well.
Moreover, PayPal has plans of extending the support to its money-making subsidiary Venmo and international markets too, starting from early next year.
With this initiative, PayPal could become a major digital wallet and a cryptocurrency exchange center, which could result in a rise of potential adoption of cryptocurrencies among everyday users as well as online merchants. Statistics show that PayPal has over 346 million active accounts, 26 million of which are merchant accounts.
In a statement about the recent initiative, CEO of PayPal Dan Schulman said “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.”.
He further added that the company is keen on working with central banks and regulators around the world in supporting cryptocurrency.
