PayPal announces support to purchase/transaction/exchange and storage in cryptocurrency
PayPal recently announced that the company will allow PayPal users in the U.S. and international markets to use PayPal payment channels to directly purchase mainstream cryptocurrencies.
Supported cryptocurrencies include Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash, and even the PayPal wallet supports direct storage of these supported cryptocurrencies.
Given that PayPal is the most widely used digital payment platform in the world, the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has also been stimulated to rise rapidly after PayPal announced the news.
At present, most of the world’s cryptocurrency transactions are exchanged for fiat currency, which can be sold through the cryptocurrency exchange and then converted into fiat currency when necessary.
While fiat currency transactions usually require payment channels, the current mainstream fiat currency payment channels are direct bank transfers, and PayPal is rarely used in cryptocurrency transactions.
The reason is that PayPal itself does not support the use of cryptocurrency transactions and because of the design mechanism PayPal allows the payer to apply for a refund to protect the interests of buyers.
“MWC Barcelona 2013 – eBay, Paypal” by Janitors is licensed under CC BY 2.0
However, after the encrypted currency transfer is completed, the refund is not supported. Therefore, fraudsters use the PayPal refund mechanism to defraud, and no one accepts PayPal anymore.
Now PayPal has announced that it supports cryptocurrency transactions at an official level. In the future, users can also purchase cryptocurrencies directly through PayPal without having to go through peer-to-peer transactions.
The reason why PayPal supports cryptocurrencies is of course not only optimistic about cryptocurrencies. PayPal’s true intention is to pry open the cryptocurrency payment market that has not yet been opened.
Due to the payment speed problem of cryptocurrency, few merchants currently fully support it, but PayPal can solve this problem completely by relying on its payment platform and technical experience.
According to PayPal’s vision, users can directly purchase encrypted currency through the PayPal wallet and store it in the wallet, and users can exchange the encrypted currency into legal currency at any time.
Both the user level and the merchant level support cryptocurrency transactions because PayPal can convert it to fiat currency to avoid speed problems during payment.
In the future, all PayPal merchants can accept cryptocurrency payments, and users in need can either pay with fiat currency or pay with cryptocurrency through PayPal.
At present, governments around the world are relatively repelling cryptocurrency because the inherent anonymity and decentralization technology of cryptocurrency can easily cause criminal acts such as illegal money laundering.
How PayPal solves anti-money laundering and regulatory issues are not yet clear. It is possible that PayPal is directly evading users’ peer-to-peer transactions and acting as a legitimate acceptor.
For example, PayPal can introduce some well-known cryptocurrency exchanges as the source of cryptocurrency, and then users can purchase and trade the cryptocurrency exchange.
This situation can effectively circumvent money laundering and other illegal problems caused by user-user transactions. Of course, this is just our guess and I don’t know if this is the case.
PayPal will be the first to provide U.S. users with a cryptocurrency trading function in the next few weeks, and PayPal will expand this function to support all international market users early next year.
Via: BBC
