Dan Schulman, President and CEO of PayPal, said that the demand for cryptocurrency assets has surpassed the company’s expectations.
During the latest interview with TIME Magazine, Schulman predicted a sharp decline in the use of cash and mentioned that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency assets can take advantage of the situation. PayPal allowed cryptocurrency payments in 2020, and the company has seen a significant surge in crypto-related transactions in the last few months.
“Demand on the crypto side has been multiple-fold to what we initially expected. There’s a lot of excitement. We’ve been looking at digital forms of currency and DLT for six years or so. But I thought it was early, and I thought the cryptocurrency assets at the time were much more assets than they were currency,” Schulman told TIME Magazine.
In March 2021, PayPal introduced ‘Checkout with Crypto service’ to allow US-based consumers to pay merchants through cryptocurrency assets. The financial services provider is planning to expand its crypto services globally in the coming months.
Last week, PayPal’s subsidiary Venmo announced support for several cryptocurrency assets including Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Institutional Adoption of Cryptocurrency Assets
Despite the recent surge in volatility across the cryptocurrency market, the adoption of digital currencies has jumped significantly since the start of this year. TIME Magazine announced a partnership with Grayscale, the world’s largest cryptocurrency asset manager, earlier this month and mentioned that the company has decided to add Bitcoin to its balance sheet. WeWork, one of the world’s leading flexible space providers, recently announced the acceptance of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies as a mode of payment. According to the latest weekly digital asset inflow report published by CoinShares, the cryptocurrency market attracted $233 million inflows last week as the total value of the global digital assets under management reached $64 billion for the first time. As of writing, the overall market cap of digital currencies stands at around $1.95 trillion, which is up by more than 7% in the last 24 hours.
(Photo: World Economic Forum)
