PayPal Expands Operations to Allow Users to Send Bitcoin to Cryptocurrency Exchanges

• PayPal and its subsidiary Venmo would allow customers to withdraw their cryptocurrency holdings to third-party platforms soon.
• The new capacity would allow users to send Bitcoin not only to each other, but also to cryptocurrency exchanges.
• The payments company believes that this move would allow digital currencies to be more useful.

PayPal revealed that soon would make cryptocurrency withdrawals in third-party wallets available to its users.

PayPal’s cryptocurrency operations to expand significantly

At CoinDesk’s Consensus 2021 conference, Jose Fernandez da Ponte, PayPal’s vice president of global business development, announced that users they will soon be able to transfer digital assets to external wallets.

The payments company allowed users to buy cryptocurrencies with fiat currency in October 2019. In March of this year, PayPal began allowing users to pay with digital currency. PayPal acquired the cryptocurrency custodian company Curv and even introduced digital asset trading last month through its subsidiary Venmo.

Following criticism that its services gave users little control over their cryptocurrency holdings, PayPal has decided to add a new feature. At the conference, Fernandez da Ponte said:

We want to make it as open as possible and we want to give our consumers a choice. We want them to be able to take the cryptocurrency they acquired and take it to the destination of their choice.

This means that users of PayPal and Venmo could send cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin to others, including cryptocurrency exchanges. He added that the company would roll out new developments every two months on average, but it is not yet clear when the new functionality will be available.

PayPal trusts Paxos to handle your cryptocurrency operations, suggesting that the blockchain infrastructure provider may also take care of integrations with third-party wallets.

Since the payments company has been in talks with central bankers around the world, Fernandez da Ponte highlighted two priorities that central banks could have, including financial stability and universal access. Seeing that there are many ways to achieve stability with digital assets, he added that central bank digital currencies (CBDC) could coexist alongside stablecoins. He explained:

Sometimes we position the debate as CBDC versus stablecoins, but it’s a bit of a bogus debate. There is no compensation. We believe that they will coexist.

While PayPal is rumored to be developing a stablecoin, the vice president said “this is too early.”