Reports are that Fintech giant PayPal plans to roll out direct sales of cryptocurrency to its 325 million users. Currently, PayPal can be used as an alternative means for withdrawing funds from exchanges such as Coinbase, but this would be a first in terms of offering direct sales of crypto.
According to an industry source, the company will have some sort of a built-in wallet functionality.
It is unclear which or how many cryptocurrencies would be available. The industry source said they expected PayPal “would be working with multiple exchanges to source liquidity”.
The service will apparently be available “in the next three months, maybe sooner”.
Crypto is increasingly seen as an obvious way to bolster user numbers on fintech apps and create new revenue streams. PayPal CEO Dan Schulman has made it clear his plan this year is to aggressively monetize Venmo, which has over 52 million accounts.
Around the start of 2020, PayPal posted job openings to ramp up its new Blockchain Research Group. PayPal posted eight engineering positions: four in San Jose and four in Singapore.
Following PayPal’s short-lived dalliance with the Facebook-led Libra project last year, the focus now is expanding its own payments expertise, one of the sources added.
