PayPal has announced that it will allow customers to transfer Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to third-party wallets.
PayPal will allow users to withdraw their cryptocurrency and send it to third-party wallets, the firm’s head of blockchain, crypto, and digital products said on Wednesday.
Speaking at CoinDesk Consensus, Jose Fernandez da Ponte announced an end to the firm’s initial practice of only allowing users to buy, hold, or sell Bitcoin, Ether, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin. PayPal runs all of its crypto transactions through Paxos, a blockchain infrastructure provider.
“We want to make it as open as possible,” da Ponte said. “We want to give choice to our consumers, something that will let them pay in any way they want to pay. They want to bring their crypto to us so they can use it in commerce, and we want them to be able to take the crypto they acquired with us and take it to the destination of their choice.”
It’s “Inevitable”
PayPal addition of cryptocurrencies to its platform on Oct. 21, 2020, with PayPal president and CEO Dan Schulman saying the “shift to digital forms of currencies is inevitable,” and that they bring “clear advantages in terms of financial inclusion and access; efficiency, speed and resilience of the payments system; and the ability for governments to disburse funds to citizens quickly.
By February 2021, Schulman said that its crypto offering had “far exceeded our expectations” and that it had “an extensive road map around crypto, blockchain, and digital currencies.”
PayPal expanded its buy-hold-sell offering in March, giving U.S. customers the ability to use their crypto holdings to pay for goods and services at its network of 24 million merchants worldwide.
PayPal’s news comes on the heels of rumors earlier this month that it was looking into launching a stablecoin of its own, something da Ponte didn’t deny. He did suggest that nothing would come of it for a while, saying it was “far too early.”
