In October there was A turning point in the world of cryptocurrencies. The reason for this was PayPal, which announced at the time that it would allow its users to trade cryptocurrencies directly through its popular payment gateway.
Today PayPal activated its “Checkout with Crypto” service, which strictly allows users from the United States You can actually pay at merchants with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ether or Bitcoin Cash. Merchants will not receive those cryptocurrencies, but the dollar equivalent of that moment (minus PayPal’s commission, of course).
PayPal becomes a fully fledged broker for cryptocurrency purchases
PayPal President Dan Shulman Taught on video First purchase with this system. The process is practically transparent to the user, That when choosing PayPal as a payment method in stores, you can choose, within the payment gateway, whether to pay with your PayPal balance, with any of your credit or debit cards, or, and this is the important thing, by using the balance in any of the supported cryptocurrencies in the system.
After choosing to pay with Bitcoin, for example, The system displays the amount of bitcoins that will be offered from our “wallet”. Among those cryptocurrencies integrated into PayPal, he is thus responsible for selling the necessary bitcoins – with no commissions applied to this transfer, They confirm In PayPal – To buy this product from the desired merchant.
A few moments later, the confirmation of the purchase arrived, which was produced by spending bitcoins or some other cryptocurrency from our PayPal balances. The process is managed by this company at all times, Although behind the work of Paxos, A company that specializes in these transactions.
It is important to note that we can only spend cryptocurrencies that we previously purchased through PayPal. The inability to use external wallets that we previously had. And Shulman explained The idea is to be able to fully follow up on transactions, which is important for compliance with the regulation.
Consequently, the differences between paying with cryptocurrency visas and traditional fiat currencies are eased. The first idea was originally about Promote decentralization, privacy and anonymity Of those operations, but it also proved to be very bad for the image of these platforms, which was inevitably linked to the purchase of goods prohibited in black markets such as the Silk Road.
At PayPal, in fact, they envision this option in a strange way, because the only people who work with end-to-end cryptocurrencies are: users can work with Bitcoin or Ether wallets, for example, but Merchants are not paid in these cryptocurrencies, but rather in dollarsAs it happens with a direct transaction in that currency. The applicable commissions do not change (2.9% + 30 cents on the purchase amount in the US) because for the merchant the entire process continues in dollars.
This, they claim on PayPal, is An opportunity for example for people who do not do business with banks, But also for migrant workers who send money to their home countries but do so with huge commissions often around 10%.
Checkout with Crypto has already started rolling out among PayPal users in the US, and It operates in more than half of its 29 million stores Who does the company work with?
More information | PayPal
