American merchants can directly purchase, hold, and sell cryptocurrencies from PayPal corporate accounts.

Author: Meta Space DAO

Article source: Meta Space DAO

Payment giant PayPal released a press release yesterday stating that American merchants can directly purchase, hold, and sell cryptocurrencies from PayPal corporate accounts, but this cryptocurrency service will not be initially open to corporate accounts in New York State.

Since October 2020, payment giant PayPal has been providing US users with the option to purchase, hold, and sell cryptocurrencies for the first time. After expanding this service to its mobile payment service Venmo in 2021, PayPal continues to work in the cryptocurrency field, attempting to bring existing users and merchants into the cryptocurrency industry.

After nearly 4 years, PayPal announced in a press release on the 25th that American merchants can directly purchase, hold, and sell cryptocurrencies from PayPal corporate accounts, but this cryptocurrency service will not be initially open to corporate accounts in New York State.

Jose Fernandez da Ponte, Senior Vice President of Blockchain at PayPal, stated that since we introduced the feature where PayPal and Venmo users can buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrencies in their wallets, we have gained a deeper understanding of how they use cryptocurrencies.

However, an increasing number of businesses have expressed a desire to obtain the same cryptocurrency features as consumers. To meet this demand, we are pleased to launch this new service to help businesses easily use digital currencies.

Not only that, PayPal also allows American merchants to transfer cryptocurrencies from the chain to supported third-party wallets.

According to a 2023 statistical data, there were approximately 17317147 websites worldwide that could use PayPal last year, with over 1039766 websites using PayPal in the United States and 308166 websites reporting using PayPal for online transactions in the United Kingdom.

It is expected that by the end of 2024, the global number of PayPal users will reach 236.7 million.

PYUSD market value exceeded 1 billion US dollars in August

In addition, Paypal's stablecoin PYUSD, which was issued on the Ethereum chain last year, has also experienced significant growth this year. Among them, PYUSD's launch on the public chain Solana in May this year is the key to rapid growth. Paypal stated that Solana is known for its extremely low-cost and high-speed processing of large amounts of transactions, providing significant advantages for commercial use cases. As the most commonly used blockchain for stablecoin transfers, Solana has become the leading blockchain for running tokenized transactions, and as Solana continues to be used in payment applications, it has become an ideal choice for PYUSD. Recently, the Solana ecosystem PayFi narrative has flourished, causing PYUSD's market value to surpass the $1 billion mark in August. (However, as the subsequent rewards expire, the circulation seems to have declined again)

Former PayPal CEO: Bitcoin outperforms fiat in cross-border transactions

According to reports, at the Microstrategy World 2024 event held in Las Vegas in May, David Marcus, former president of PayPal and current CEO of Lightspark, shared the prospects of combining artificial intelligence (AI) with Bitcoin (BTC) during the "Bitcoin for Companies" segment.

David Marcus believes that Bitcoin has the potential to become the primary trading currency for AI and describes it as "maximally neutral". For AI systems operating in different countries or regions, this characteristic gives it an advantage over traditional fiat currencies such as the euro or dollar.

Marcus emphasized at the meeting that Bitcoin can eliminate the inherent inefficiencies and frictions of fiat currency. He predicts that AI agents will adopt this' digital native 'trading medium.