Online financial service company; PayPal, announced the launch of a new service that will allows users with PayPal accounts to purchase, store and trade cryptocurrency. This follows the company’s plans to multiply cryptocurrency’s utility by making it available as a funding source for purchases at its 26 million merchants worldwide. The newly launched service will enable consumers to instantly convert their selected cryptocurrency balance to fiat currency, with certainty of value and no extra fees. PayPal merchants will have no additional integrations or fees, as all transactions will be settled with fiat currency at their current PayPal rates. Consumers cryptocurrency simply becomes another funding source within their PayPal digital wallet.
The trend of the shift towards cryptocurrency as a means of payment continues to go on, as more big companies embrace digital currency.
The crypto security startup that PayPal acquired is called Curv and is based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Curv is a cryptocurrency company and works to ensure that people’s crypto assets are securely kept. The company operates a service based on the cloud; users can therefore access their crypto wallet without any hassle or hardware device. Curv is very secure as it uses multi-party computation to handle private keys. Users require cryptographic secrets to initiate transactions on their wallets, and they are generated on both Curv’s servers and on the users’ phones. Whenever users try to perform a transaction, multiple secrets are used to generate a full public and private key which is then used to complete the transaction.
Dan Schulman, President and CEO of PayPal said; ‘the shift to digital forms of currencies is inevitable, bringing with its 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’.
In his statement, he also mentioned of how the company intends on working with financial institution to facilitate the smooth use of cryptocurrency, he 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. We are eager to work with central banks and regulators around the world to offer our support, and to meaningfully contribute to shaping the role that digital currencies will play in the future of global finance and commerce’.
PayPal will feature Bitcoin, Etherum, Bitcoin cash and Litecoin, directly within the PayPal digital wallet. It has also been granted a first-of-its-kind conditional ‘Bitlicense’ by the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). PayPal says its aim for launching its new service is to increase consumer understanding and adoption of cryptocurrency.
The service is now available to PayPal accountholders in the U.S. PayPal intends on expanding the features to Venmo and selected international markets in the first half of 2021.
Ibhadojemu Lucky Emmanuel is a graduate of Education and Economics from the University of Benin. He has a passion for tech and business and has been writing professionally for over a period of five years. He's written across various topics and segments and knew tech-business was it when he first stumbled on it. He has a great passion for music and arts, and wants to visit as many countries as he can someday.
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