As Bitcoin spirals upward all-time highs of $60,000 per coin, PayPal announces it is introducing a new PayPal Checkout tool that will enable Bitcoin payments for some 29 million merchants attached to its platform.
Calling the new effort “a new way for businesses to get paid,” PayPal is also increasing Bitcoin weekly purchases from an original amount of $10,000 per week, to $20,000 per week.
In keeping with the appeal of decentralized finance and its frictionless transactions, PayPal is suggesting it will offer these options with standard conversion rates, and no fees. The conversion process means that merchants won’t actually acquire Bitcoin – PayPal will change the money out before sending it to the recipient.
PayPal has all suggested it will provide 1099s for record-keeping, although it’s not entirely clear how that will work.
Top brass at PayPal are optimistic.
“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,” President and CEO Dan Schulman told Reuters. “We think it is a transitional point where cryptocurrencies move from being predominantly an asset class that you buy, hold and or sell to now becoming a legitimate funding source to make transactions in the real world at millions of merchants.”
These remarks gel with others heard from analysts and experts in finance who are suggesting that Bitcoin is less of a “fringe” asset than it used to be, partly because of dollar concerns, a battered equity market, and new different types of uncertainty applied to fiat currencies.
Here’s a bit that we previously passed on from Greg Thomson’s recent report at Cointelegraph, Soros fund manager Dawn Fitzpatrick’s assessment that Bitcoin gained from the frenetic injection of new money into the U.S. economy:
“I think when it comes to crypto generally, we’re at a really important moment in time, in that, something like Bitcoin might have stayed a fringe asset, but for the fact that, over the last 12 months, we’ve increased money supply in the U.S. by 25%,” Fitzpatrick said.
Certainly, a payment solution like this from a name like PayPal is a further on-ramp for millions of BTC fans. Stay tuned.
