World News – AU – PayPal Goes Crypto With New Features For Trading And Shopping

PayPal announced a new feature on Wednesday that will allow users to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrencies, becoming the latest major financial services provider to show interest in the space

The company said in a press release that its new cryptocurrency service will launch in the US in the coming weeks and will initially include Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin By early 2021, the company also plans to allow customers to use crypto to shop with its network of 26 million retailers

Shares of PayPal soar more than 3% at the start of trading in New York The price of Bitcoin meanwhile rose almost 5% to trade at around $ 12,440, according to data from CoinDesk

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« The shift to digital forms of currencies is inevitable, bringing clear benefits in terms of financial inclusion and access, efficiency, speed and resilience of the payments system and capacity for governments to quickly disburse funds to citizens, « PayPal CEO Dan Schulman said in a statement

« We look forward to working with central banks and regulators around the world to offer our support, and to significantly contribute to shaping the role that digital currencies will play in the future of global finance and commerce « 

Central banks around the world have explored the idea of ​​issuing their own digital currencies Seven of the world’s largest central banks including the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank â ???? recently established a framework on how such a system could work Meanwhile, the People’s Bank of China continued testing for its own proposed digital currency

To launch the feature, PayPal said it had partnered with cryptocurrency start-up Paxos The company added that it had obtained a conditional license for virtual currency from state regulators of New York It plans to roll out crypto features to its Venmo mobile wallet and to international markets in the first half of 2021

The announcement comes as more financial institutions report their entry into the nascent cryptocurrency market Square, the financial technology company of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has long offered cryptocurrency and recently bought $ 50 million in bitcoin, while investment manager Fidelity established its own crypto division last year

It also highlights the efforts of companies to come up with crypto use cases other than speculative trading, like e-commerce and payments. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have gained a reputation for wild price swings Bitcoin noticeably climbed nearly $ 20,000 at the end of 2017 before dropping the following year It is currently trading over $ 12,400 and is up over 70% since the start of the year

Elsewhere in space, Facebook and a number of other tech companies are working together on a digital currency called Libra which they hope will allow cheaper and faster cross-border payments. The project faced a backlash from policymakers last year and its supporters had to change course with their monetary model to appease regulators

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