PayPal: cryptocurrency payments by end of March

The CEO of PayPal, Dan Schulman, has announced the launch of the cryptocurrency payment service by the end of the first quarter of 2021, with all existing crypto features – buying, selling and storing – being extended outside the US in the coming months. 

He said this during the Q4 2020 earnings call held on Wednesday, during which he said: 

“We saw an exceptional response from our crypto launch. Even with high initial expectations, the volume of crypto traded on our platform greatly exceeded our projections. We are excited to build upon this early success by allowing customers to use their crypto balance as a funding source whenever they shop at our 29 million merchants. We anticipate the rollout of that capability to begin late this quarter, and we hope to launch our first international market in the next several months. These initial steps are just the beginning of an extensive roadmap around crypto, Blockchain, and digital currencies. We are already working with the regulators in central banks to reimagine and shape the next generation of the financial system as consumers no longer wanting to handle cash”.

These features will also be extended to the Venmo app. 

He also revealed that users who are using PayPal for cryptocurrencies are opening their PayPal app twice as much as they did previously.

Right now, these features are only available to US users, and include the ability to buy, store and sell cryptocurrencies. 

Cryptocurrency payments with PayPal by March

But by the end of March, functionality will be added that will allow users who own cryptocurrencies on PayPal to also use them to make common fiat currency payments. 

In fact, PayPal does not allow tokens to be sent directly from its app to a public address on the blockchain, but will allow tokens held by users to be used to fund normal fiat currency payments thanks to an immediate and automatic conversion. 

In other words, rather than drawing from their fiat currency balance, a credit or debit card, or a bank account, they will also be able to draw funds from their cryptocurrency balances when they send fiat currency to someone. 

In addition, all of these features will also be enabled for users outside the US in the coming months, although Schulman did not reveal when.