Paypal Reveals That It’s Working Towards Crypto Capabilities

Paypal stands as an incredibly popular payments service provider but is just as well-known for its stance on crypto. For years, the company has been completely aligned against it, with its sentiment only changing relatively recently. The latest demonstration of this sentiment change is the payment service provider revealing that it’s hard at work on the development of crypto-related capabilities.

Showing Interest In Crypto Capabilities

Through a letter the company sent to the European Commission back in March of this year, the company revealed something interesting. The letter stated that Paypal had taken to monitoring the crypto-asset space and its evolution. Furthermore, it stated that it was taking unilateral, tangible steps in order to develop capabilities in this field of technology, in particular. This is especially the case since the announcement of Facebook’s Libra stablecoin was made back in June of 2019. The stablecoin had lost a lot of support, gained some more, and is now wholly re-worked, but it’s still planned for development, as is its competitor, Celo.

It should be noted that Paypal was initially a member of the Libra Association, being one for a few months in total. This changed, however, when threats of increased scrutiny forced Paypal, as well as other companies like Visa and Mastercard, to pull their support from the project altogether.

Aims Of Tapping Into Crypto Market

With a user base of 300 million users across the globe, the news that Paypal is in the development of crypto capabilities is one of considerable import. The letter Paypal sent to the Commission in March was, itself, a response to public consultations that the institution had launched in December of 2019. This consultation was to receive feedback in regards to regulatory framework developments for cryptocurrency at the level of the EU.

Paypal, unsurprisingly, has started to show interest in this technology as a whole. The official reason the company gave is to leverage both blockchain and crypto to achieve higher levels of financial inclusion, as well as eliminate, or reduce the pain points of the financial services of this day and age.

Small Steps Already Taken

Quite recently, Paypal had given its support to Pundi X, a crypto firm based in Singapore, allowing for fiat transactions on its platform. It seems that the global payment provider is starting to realize just how much money it can make if it taps into this crypto market. In the end, one can only hope the consumer benefits the most out of it.