PayPal customers will soon have access to a greater range of crypto services through the global payment platform, CEO Dan Schulman said during PayPal’s Q2 2021 investor update call yesterday.

Fast facts

• Describing the upgrade as “code complete,” Schulman said the wallet should be fully available for customers in the Unite States in the next several months. New features will include high-yield savings, early access to direct deposit funds and messaging functions, and will be “driven by advanced AI and other machine learning capabilities.”
• After PayPal-owned Venmo launched cryptocurrency services on its platform in April, the firm reported US$58 billion in total payment volume for the quarter across 76 million active accounts. PayPal itself reported 400 million active users during this quarter with US$311 billion in total payment volume.
• PayPal recently increased its crypto purchase limit for customers in the U.S. to US$100,000 a week in order to give customers “more choice and flexibility” when it comes to using their crypto on the platform.
• Following an earlier PayPal announcement that it would allow the transfer of crypto funds to third party wallets, Jose Fernandez da Ponte, a vice president at PayPal, said he saw payment platforms as the “natural way” to distribute central bank digital currencies in the future. He also believed that — notwithstanding the fees that PayPal imposes, which some users have criticize for being too high — private payment platforms could help deliver governmental stimulus, which had become a major concern at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Author profile

Lachlan is a journalist and producer at Forkast and pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Macleay College in Australia. His work can be found in numerous magazines in Australia on topics ranging from culture to science.

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