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On Monday, Bitcoin broke its all-time record when its price got up to $19,850.11. Although it has dropped since, experts believe we might see the price of one coin going above $20,000 before the end of the year.
One of the main reasons behind Bitcoin’s recent bullish run is the fact that America’s second-largest financial institution has opened its doors to cryptocurrencies – PayPal is officially Bitcoin-friendly.
PayPal’s entry into the world of cryptocurrencies started in October. Fast-forward two months and nearly 20% of PayPal users have used it to trade Bitcoin.
That percentage is bound to go up soon as the financial giant has come up with a new brand-new plan, revealed by the company CEO Dan Schulman earlier this week.
PayPal is officially America’s fastest-growing bank (technically speaking, the company is a “disruptor”), as well as the second-largest financial institution in the US, with $251 billion online payments processed.
The company has no intention of backing down, as explained by its CEP Dan Schulman, who said on Monday PayPal’s planning to embrace cryptocurrencies even more.
The biggest revelation from his announcement was that PayPal is going to start enabling customers to use Bitcoin and other cryptos for making online purchases. At the movement, PayPal users can only buy, sell, and store cryptocurrencies on this platform. However, they cannot use them for payments.
That’s going to change in the first half of 2021, according to Schulman, who said the users will be able to use cryptos at more than 28 million merchants.
Another big news is that PayPal-owned payment service Venmo is also going to become Bitcoin-friendly in the next couple of months.
PayPal’s crypto service is not at the disposal of all of its users. In fact, it’s available only in the US, but even in America, not everyone has this luxury. Schulman, however, says that PayPal is going to expand this service to all of American customers who are interested in crypto trading, apart from those based in Hawaii.
PayPal users from other countries, however, don’t have the option to trade cryptos on this platform. The good news is that the change is coming next year. Dan Schulman’s plan is for PayPal Bitcoin trade to go global within the first six months of 2021.
Until then, PayPal users have limited options when Bitcoin buying is concerned. The thing is that a majority of leading crypto exchanges do not work with PayPal.
Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, and most other major cryptocurrency exchanges do not allow users to buy Bitcoin from them using PayPal. The reason for this lies in the fact that PayPal has a chargeback option, which could make things more complicated for the exchanges, as it’s impossible to reverse a Bitcoin transaction.
For this reason, most exchanges only allow the users to use PayPal for withdrawals, that is, for selling cryptos. Sure, there are a couple of big-name exchanges that accept PayPal for Bitcoin buying and selling, the best example being eToro.
Still, most PayPal users tend to go with peer-to-peer marketplaces like Paxful and Localbitcoins. Whether these platforms are going to become obsolete once PayPal’s Bitcoin platform expands.
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