PayPal, the online payment processing giant announced the launch “Checkout with Crypto” service for US customers today. This would allow customers to pay in four cryptocurrencies that PayPal currently supports including Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash. This is a significant breakthrough for crypto adoption and usage worldwide given PayPal has over 300 million users and nearly 20 million active merchants.
Dan Schulman, President and CEO of PayPal said, “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.” He also said that “We think it is a transitional point where cryptocurrencies move from being predominantly an asset class that you buy, hold and or sell to now becoming a legitimate funding source to make transactions in the real world at millions of merchants.”
Earlier last year PayPal added support for the above-mentioned four cryptocurrencies. However, the users could only buy/sell or hold within the app without any option for using it as a form of payment. The growing demand for cryptocurrencies brought rapid change in the stance of many mainstream payment processing giants and financial institutions.
The offering made PayPal one of the largest mainstream financial companies to open its network to cryptocurrencies. It will help to fuel a rally in virtual coin prices. The company will charge no transaction fee to checkout with crypto. If a merchant doesn’t take US dollars, users don’t have to worry about the conversion. PayPal will convert those dollars into local currency at standard conversion rates set by PayPal.
The feature will automatically appear in the PayPal wallet if a user has a “sufficient cryptocurrency balance to cover an eligible purchase”. Users will be able to see their crypto balances for each kind of coin in the app. However, you can only use one type of cryptocurrency for each purchase you make.
The PayPal news comes just 24 hours after Visa announced. They started a new payments system using stablecoins on the Ethereum blockchain. The pilot will see participating merchants agree to settle customers’ fiat transactions using the USDC stablecoin.
