PayPal, along with Venmo – its mobile payment service, is reportedly planning to offer direct sales of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to its 300 million+ users globally, said a report by Coindesk, citing three people privy to the matter. Notably, PayPal has a longstanding business relationship with Coinbase.
According to the report, PayPal is looking to offer buying and selling of crypto and said the service could be expected “in the next three months, maybe sooner.”.
Citing a well-placed industry source, the report said that Paypal is going to allow “buys and sells of crypto” directly from PayPal and Venmo and may have some sort of a built-in wallet functionality so one can store cryptocurrencies in there.
About Paypal subsidiary, Venmo, it alone handled US$12 billion in transactions in the first quarter of 2018. Venmo is a type of peer-to-peer (P2P) payment platform with a mobile app that enables sending money easily among friends. It required No credit card, no wallet, no fees besides just linking the app to a debit card and to spend’em.
It is unclear which or how many cryptocurrencies would be available, said the report further.The industry source, as per Coindesk, said they expected PayPal “would be working with multiple exchanges to source liquidity.”
As of the end of 2019, PayPal had 305 mmillion active users, whereas Coinbase, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the U.S., has 11.7 million users. And Binance, one of the world’s largest, has only 15 million.
Notably, in October last year Paypal had withdrew itself from Libra Association, the Facebook-initiated crypto project, to instead “continue to focus on advancing our existing mission and business priorities as we strive to democratize access to financial services for underserved populations.”
With Coinbase, which is also a crypto-exchange, PayPal has a partnership that allows users (in North America and Europe) to withdraw and deposit cash between the two platforms.
In an interview with CoinDesk earlier this year, PayPal Chief Technology Officer Sri Shivananda said the company wanted its own “perspective and view on [blockchain] technology itself to see how it can help us contribute to the concept of creating an open digital payments platform that can serve everyone.”