PayPal Unveils Crypto Trading for US Merchants

Payment giant PayPal is looking to allow US merchants to buy, hold, and sell crypto assets directly from their business account accounts.

Background

• Jose Fernandez da Ponte, the company’s Senior Vice President of Blockchain, Crypto, and Digital Currencies highlighted that business owners have “increasingly” expressed a desire for the same crypto capabilities available to consumers
• Here it is worth recalling that in 2020, PayPal announced the availability of its customers to trade crypto directly from their PayPal and Venmo accounts
• The executive further underlined that since the doors for PayPal and Venmo consumers to buy, sell, and hold crypto assets in their wallets were opened, the firm has "learned a lot" about how they want to use their holdings
• The company is a holder of the trust license granted by the state's Department of Financial Services

Why should you pay attention?

• US merchants will now be able to externally transfer crypto on-chain to eligible third-party wallets
• Parallelly, PayPal business account holders can also send and receive supported crypto tokens to and from external blockchain addresses
• This could prove to be revolutionary over the long-term
• At launch, the service will not be available to New York businesses
• The payment giant has not chalked out a timeframe outlining when that would change

Who said what?

• Fernandez da Ponte asserted,

“We're excited to meet that demand by delivering this new offering, empowering them to engage with digital currencies effortlessly."

Zooming out

• PayPal has been making significant strides within the crypto arena
• A year back, it set afloat its native stablecoin, PYUSD, on Ethereum
• Earlier this year, it launched the asset on the Solana blockchain
• This was done with the intention to migrate from the “awareness to the utility phase” in the long-term process of adoption