Paypal’s inclination towards crypto and blockchain is reshaping the market

Several tech and investment giants have joined the crypto race in the last 12 months and Paypal happens to be one of the most notable and trustworthy names in this regard, as they entered the niche in October 2020. The reason why this move is quite significant is that Paypal has more than 350 million users and the company now enables all of them to buy, sell and hold digital assets.

Since we are discussing the reshaping of the market, please note that Paypal’s adoption of digital assets is just a catalyst in this densely growing market as Tesla and Mastercard also joined the race and what’s most important to note is that Tesla invested about $1.5B in Bitcoin, which pushed it to the ATH value of over $44,000.

Since Paypal happens to be a 22-year-old company and their market dominance in payment processing (for fiat) is rather unparalleled, it is quite safe to say that cryptocurrencies are right on the edge of mainstream adoption and the trust in digital assets is growing decently as well.

Although the use case is currently restricted to buying, selling, and holding of a few digital currencies, the company plans to extend its use case and enable the customers to pay with their crypto wallet balances on millions of Paypal merchants – and this advancement is expected to happen in 2021, however, the exact dates have not been rolled out yet.

It is worth noticing that this major move did not happen overnight and Paypal has been exploring the potential in cryptocurrencies for several years and their inclination became evident when the company’s CEO extended their Board of Directors by hiring Wences Casares and a comprehensive discussion round began as to how Paypal could provide crypto-related solutions to their customers and to increase the inclusion as well.

Within a year after that, in 2017, Paypal grouped a research team with the sole purpose to explore blockchain technology, with respect to Paypal’s current offerings and future initiatives. However, 2020 was instrumental for Paypal as the Covid-19 pandemic made it crystal clear that the public is eager to go for digital means of payment as well as for savings and the pace of adoption also grew significantly. That was the time when the company decided to move its theories and research into a product and introduce its plans in front of the public.

Despite all these advancements and market reshaping, it should be noted that although the adoption of cryptocurrencies has set a trend and it’s quite positive, there is still a long way to travel due to the following reasons:

• The governments need to acknowledge cryptocurrencies and start making regulations so the people have more confidence and the entire taxation system can support their “unique” holdings as well
• The concerns around privacy and security have grown in the last few years and the industry needs to work on these two areas exponentially to give more confidence to consumers and there is already plenty of work going on in this area, for instance, the recent switch by Litecoin to MimbleWimble