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Later this Tuesday, PayPal Holdings Inc will announce that U.S. consumers can start to use their cryptocurrency holdings to pay at millions of its online merchants globally. This move could significantly boost the use of digital assets in everyday commerce.
Customers who hold Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin in their PayPal digital wallets will now be able to convert their holdings into fiat currencies at checkouts to make purchases, the company said.
PayPal revealed that it had been working for over a year on the project, that will soon be available at all of its 29 million merchants in the coming months.
Ahead of the formal announcement, 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,” President and CEO Dan Schulman told Reuters ahead of a formal announcement.
The company said that it will charge no transaction fee to checkout with crypto and only one type of coin can be used for each purchase.
Last year October PayPal already started offering its users in the U.S. the possibility to buy, sell and hold cryptocurrencies. And by doing so it immediately became one of the largest mainstream financial companies to include cryptocurrency. Now it is going one step further and adds transactions.
Merchants will start benefitting directly from the increased adoption of cryptocurrency and will be able to receive payments. However, since the cryptocurrency is settled in fiat currency, they will not be exposed to any volatility risks. It seems they are getting pretty good odds to get involved now.
“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,” Schulman said.
Earlier in the week, Visa announced it will start using USD Coin cryptocurrency to settle transactions on its payments network worldwide.