Paypal Begins Crypto Service: CEO Reveals Increased Limits, Expansion Plans, Venmo Rollout

Payments giant Paypal has revealed more details of its new cryptocurrency service. The company is currently rolling out crypto functionality to U.S. customers, after which it will launch the service internationally and on the Venmo platform.

Paypal’s CEO Unveils Crypto Plans

Paypal CEO Dan Schulman provided new details of the company’s new cryptocurrency service during the Q3 2020 earnings call on Monday. Paypal recently announced that its customers will be able to buy, hold, and sell cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, directly from their Paypal accounts. Cryptocurrencies in Paypal accounts can also be used to pay for purchases at 28 million stores worldwide.

“Clearly the world is rapidly moving from physical to digital and that’s so true for payments and financial services,” Schulman began. He added that based on his conversations with central banks and people in the crypto industry, “there’s no question that digital currencies are going to be rising in importance, having increasing functionality and increasing prominence.” The CEO also believes that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) “are a matter of when and how they are done, not if.”

He claims that Paypal, with its digital wallets and the scale it currently has, “can help shape the utility of those currencies.” The CEO opined: “I do think that our platform and the new digital infrastructure that we are putting in place right now can help make that management and movement of money more efficient and less expensive and faster.”

Regarding Paypal’s recently announced crypto service, the CEO shared: “Our base is very eager for us to offer these capabilities. It really came up very high on their wish list.” He additionally revealed:

We’ve only rolled this out to 10% of our base. We did that a couple of days ago. But our waiting list is 2 to 3 times what our expectations were. We are going to take up our $10,000 limit per day to $15,000 per day based on the demand that we are seeing.

“We’ll roll out to 100% in the U.S. in the next two to three weeks. Then we are going to expand internationally and we will expand into Venmo in the first half of next year,” he continued. “That’s what we starting off with.”

Moreover, the CEO said that Paypal is already “seeing people who have already bought crypto” on its platform, noting that some users “opened their wallets several times a day to check on what’s happening with their crypto investments … We are beginning to already see some halo effects that go on with that.”

Schulman, who previously disclosed that he owns bitcoin, elaborated:

But what I’m really excited about is what we are going to introduce next year, which I think is going to dramatically increase the utility of cryptocurrencies by enabling somebody who holds a cryptocurrency in a Paypal account to instantaneously transfer that crypto into fiat currency.

He explained that no additional integration is needed at the 28 million merchants and cryptocurrency transactions are “immediately settled into fiat,” adding that this method is “a lower-cost funding mechanism” for Paypal.

In conclusion, Schulman said that besides the plans detailed above, “Over the course of next year, you will see us move into a couple of different areas,” noting that he sees “a lot of interesting things” Paypal can do with cryptocurrencies. The CEO emphasized that his company is “Working hand-in-hand with regulators every step of the way which is so important in what they expect from us in order to be a market leader in the digital currency space.”