The cryptocurrency market. Some believe that it is on its way to reaching the maturity necessary to become a far-reaching alternative (or complement) to the traditional financial system, while others maintain that it is a bubble orchestrated by scammers and speculators. Certainly not all agree .
Beyond the opposing perspectives that revolve around this cryptographic world, we can say that it continues to move. And it does so in the face of the rises and falls of bitcoin , regulatory challenges like the one being experienced in the United States , exchange debacles like FTX and bets from financial giants like PayPal .
PayPal Takes Cryptocurrency Seriously
The fact that a payment company with a global presence and more than 435 million users enters the crypto scene can be understood as an important boost for the sector that can encourage other traditional players to follow the same path. Although PayPal has taken years to decide and take the steps we are seeing today.
The icing on the cake will be the management style of Alex Chriss. We are talking about an executive from Intuit who, among his achievements, led the purchase of Mailchimp and as of September 27 will become CEO of PayPal, replacing Dan Schulman, who has held this position since 2014.
PayPal’s interest in cryptocurrencies dates back to 2013, when the company’s CEO, David Marcus, acknowledged in an interview that they were thinking about whether bitcoin would become a financing instrument for their platform, although his wishes they did not materialize.
Marcus left his job at the online payments firm to start working at Facebook (now Meta) where he later started working on a stablecoin whose dream was to “reinvent money” and ended up perishing under pressure from regulators shortly after change name from Libra to Diem .
Meanwhile, PayPal began to materialize its first actions in the direction of cryptography. In 2014 it partnered with Coinbase, BitPay and GoCoin to accept bitcoin payments . Years later, in 2018, he filed a patent on an “Accelerated System for Virtual Currency Transactions” aimed at optimizing transactions.
In the following years, the firm deployed investments in the world of cryptocurrencies and joined Libra (before his death). The most significant step, however, was when it finally announced its most ambitious foray into this space: allowing the buying and selling of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether on its platform.
Since then, PayPal has not stopped implementing improvements in its cryptographic proposal. Users were given the ability to pay for purchases with their cryptocurrencies (although sellers would receive money in dollars). And, when all seemed calm, PayPal launched its own PYUSD stablecoin.
We have to wait to find out what will be the innovations that Alex Chriss (who is in favor of cryptocurrencies) will promote when he assumes the leadership of the company, but everything seems to indicate that PayPal is focused on acquiring a leading role in this market, something that seems benefit the entire ecosystem for the future.
