The web payments giant is preparing for the revolution — starting from the beginning of 2021, PayPal will make it possible to buy and sell cryptocurrencies and use them for payments.
The confirmation comes from the executive director Dan Schulman, who hoped that this move “encourages the global use of virtual currencies.”
The online payments giant has stated, starting from the beginning of 2021, its users will be able to spend their cryptocurrencies to make purchases at the more than 26 million merchants who use its services. PayPal currently has around 346 million active accounts, which have allowed it to process payments worth 222 billion dollars during the second quarter of this year.
Although PayPal users will be able to buy, sell and hold cryptocurrencies in their PayPal wallets but, cryptocurrency payments processed by PayPal will be settled in fiat currencies, so merchants will receive payments in dollars, euros, or their reference currency.
So to be able to use cryptocurrencies on the payment network, they must be purchased and sold directly through PayPal. In other words — if we have a personal wallet and we already have cryptocurrency funds, we will not be able to transfer them to PayPal. Not only that, cryptocurrencies cannot be transferred between PayPal accounts but used only to make payments to merchants.
In addition to the “king” Bitcoin among the cryptocurrencies initially supported, there will also be Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin. It is currently not known whether PayPal wants to expand support to any of the numerous other existing cryptocurrencies in the future.
Last year, PayPal was among the founding members of Facebook-led cryptocurrency project Libra but dropped out after a few months as Libra was getting a lot of opposition from the government.
