PayPal’s digital currency service launching by November 23rd

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During PayPal’s Q3 earnings call on November 2nd, PayPal CEO Daniel Schulman gave several updates regarding PayPal’s digital currency service offering. Schulman says that PayPal’s digital currency service is currently live for 10% of its American users but will be available to 100% of its American users within two to three weeks. This means that United States residents will have access to PayPal’s digital currency service by November 23rd at the latest. 

 Schulman also announced that PayPal is increasing its weekly purchasing limit from $10,000 to $15,000, the waiting list to use the new service is 2-3 times larger than PayPal was expecting demand to be, and the individuals who already have access to the service typically check their PayPal digital currency wallet multiple times a day.

Will PayPal’s offering increase utility?

“I think that our platform with its digital wallets and the scale that we have right now can help shape the utility of those currencies that can range from interoperability between wallets, between the currencies themselves, and importantly into our network of merchants for commerce,” said Schulman during the earnings call.

“what I’m really excited about is what we’re going to introduce next year, which is, I think 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 at a set rate.”

Many digital currencies have no utility, but PayPal believes that its service offering–especially the features they roll out in 2021 that allows merchants to accept digital currency but receive the payment in fiat–will give many digital currencies utility. This is undeniably true, but it will be interesting to see what percentage of PayPal wallet users will actually spend their digital currency with participating merchants.

When it comes to the digital currency industry, Schulman and PayPal have a positive outlook regarding the work they can do in the industry,

“ I see a lot of interesting things we can do with cryptocurrencies, with functionality, increasing functionality, and again, working hand in hand with regulators every step of the way, which is so important and what they expect from us in order to be a market leader in the digital currency space.”