Later today, PayPal Holdings Inc will reveal that it has begun allowing U.S. customers to use their cryptocurrency holdings to pay at millions of its online retailers around the world.
PayPal customers with bitcoin, ether, bitcoin currency and litecoin in their digital wallets will be able to turn their holdings into fiat currencies at checkouts to make transactions.
PayPal said the service would be available to all of its 29 million merchants in the coming months.
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.”
In October the company revealed that PayPal users can now purchase, sell, and keep cryptocurrencies via Checkout with Crypto.
PayPal became one of the biggest conventional financial firms to open its network to cryptocurrencies as a result of the sale, which assisted in the growth of virtual coin prices.
Bitcoin’s value has nearly doubled since the beginning of the year, thanks to increased interest from larger financial institutions banking on greater acceptance and seeing it as a hedge against inflation.
PayPal’s announcement comes less than a week after Tesla Inc revealed that it would accept bitcoin payments for its vehicles. Unlike PayPal transactions, where merchants obtain fiat currency, Tesla has confirmed that the bitcoin used as payment will be owned by the company.
Despite the fact that the emerging asset is gaining momentum among mainstream investors, it has yet to become a widely accepted form of payment, owing to its ongoing volatility.
PayPal aims to improve this by enabling merchants to avoid the risk of currency fluctuations by settling transactions in fiat currency.
Schulman said, “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.”
According to Paypal, there will be no transaction fees when paying with cryptocurrency, and each payment will be limited to one form of coin.
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