PayPal Now Allows U.S. Customers to Spend Their Crypto Holdings At Online Merchants Worldwide

In a major development, online payments giant PayPal Holdings has started letting its U.S. customers spend their cryptocurrency holdings to millions of online merchants worldwide.

PayPal launched crypto buying/selling facility last year in November 2020 and had already scheduled to start merchant payments in early 2021. It looks like the payments giant has kept its promise! This move from PayPal will significantly boost cryptocurrency acceptance as a payments options for its worldwide users.

PayPal U.S. customers holding either of Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Litecoin (LTC) in their digital wallets can convert their holdings to fiat at the time of checkout. PayPal has assured that the service shall be available to its 29 million merchants in the coming months.

Ahead of the formal announcement, PayPal President and CEO Dan Schulman told Reuters: “This is the first time you can seamlessly use cryptocurrencies in the same way as a credit card or a debit card inside your PayPal wallet”.

This offering from PayPal makes it one of the largest mainstream financial companies to provide cryptocurrency support on its platform. Recently, payments and settlements giant VISA also announced support for the USDC settlements on its network.

The PayPal announcement comes just at a time when institutions have been aggressively making their bet in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Besides, corporates have started moving the ball by buying Bitcoin from their reserve cash.

Last week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that the world’s largest automobile company will start accepting Bitcoins as payments against their Tesla cars sold. “You can now buy a Tesla with Bitcoin. Tesla is using only internal & open source software & operates Bitcoin nodes directly. Bitcoin paid to Tesla will be retained as Bitcoin, not converted to fiat currency,” said Musk.

It looks like we are now entering the era of mainstream crypto acceptance. while PayPal launches its crypto payments service today, this is just the beginning of company’s future plans in this space.

Last month, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman announced the launch of PayPal’s dedicated business unit that looks after crypto and blockchain operations. Schulman said: “These initial steps are just the beginning of an extensive roadmap around crypto, blockchain and digital currencies. We are significantly investing in our new crypto, blockchain, and digital currencies business unit in order to help shape this more inclusive future”.