On Tuesday (March 30), the Bitcoin price went above the $59,000 level for the first time in 10 days.
According to a report by Reuters, later today, payments firm PayPal Holdings, Inc. will announce that it is “allowing U.S. consumers to use their cryptocurrency holdings to pay at millions of its online merchants globally.”
PayPal President and CEO Dan Schulman told Reuters:
“This is the first time you can seamlessly use cryptocurrencies in the same way as a credit card or a debit card inside your PayPal wallet.“
The four supported cryptoassets are Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash ($BCH), Ether ($ETH), and Litecoin ($LTC).
PayPal first announced support for crypto back on 21 October 2020. Back then, PayPal’s crypto service, which started in beta mode on the date of the announcement served only a small subset (around 10,000) of PayPal’s customers in the U.S., and it allowed them to “buy, hold and sell cryptocurrency directly from their PayPal account.”
The PayPal CEO had this to say back at that time:
“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.“
The Reuters report went on to say that PayPal “will charge no transaction fee to checkout with crypto and only one type of coin can be used for each purchase.”
Per a report by The Verge, “if a merchant doesn’t take US dollars, PayPal also converts those dollars into local currency at standard conversion rates set by PayPal.”
The Verge says that PayPal’s new “Checkout with Crypto” feature “will automatically appear in the PayPal wallet if a user has a ‘sufficient cryptocurrency balance to cover an eligible purchase,’ and that “you’ll be able to see your crypto balances for each kind of coin in the app.”
Crypto exchange OKEx CEO Jay Hao had this to say (on Twitter) about PayPal’s upcoming announcement:
“The entire financial system has been destined to be disrupted and transformed since the day the genesis block of #Bitcoin was mined. Crypto adoption is coming.“
According to data by CryptoCompare, currently (as of 11:28 UTC on March 30), Bitcoin is trading around $59,047, up 1.74% in the past 24-hour period. This is despite the U.S. dollar index (93.14 as of 11:41 UTC) and the yield on the U.S. 10-Year Treasury Note (1.770% as of 11:51 UTC) both going up today.
The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.
