Circle Co-Founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire has become one of the first people in the crypto community to buy BTC using his PayPal account.
On Wednesday (October 28), Allaire posted a tweet that shows he was able to buy $100 in Bitcoin using PayPal’s recently-announced service that lets PayPal customers “buy, hold and sell cryptocurrency directly from their PayPal account.”
Allaire seems delighted with the service and calls it a “great milestone” for the crypto market.
When one XRP fan pointed out that Allaire won’t be able to transfer out his newly-purchased BTC to a hardware crypto wallet (such as those from Ledger), Allaire tweeted in reply “Crawl walk run. They will get there. Baby steps.”
PayPal Holdings Inc. announced support for cryptocurrency on October 21.
According to PayPal’s press release, Dan Schulman, President and CEO, PayPal, had this to say:
“The shift to digital forms of currencies is inevitable, bringing with it 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.
“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.”
It is not clear yet how Allaire was able to use PayPal’s new service so soon since according to PayPal’s announcement, which had stated that initially the only supported jurisdiction would be the U.S., the launch would happen “in the coming weeks.”
It is worth noting that the Circle CEO was able to buy Bitcoin via PayPal without having to pay a transaction fee. This is because PayPal has promised “no service fees when buying or selling Cryptocurrency through December 31, 2020.”
