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PayPal announced Wednesday that millions of U.S. merchants can now buy, hold, and trade crypto assets directly from their business accounts. The new functionality builds on the company’s service for retail users, potentially opening up a bigger market for the Silicon Valley-based payments behemoth. However, the feature will not be available for U.S. merchants in New York at launch.
PayPal Extends Crypto Offering To Businesses
In another effort to expand its presence in the crypto sphere, PayPal has announced plans to allow U.S. business customers to buy, sell, and hold digital assets such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH).
U.S. merchants will also be able to externally transfer cryptocurrency on-chain to “third-party eligible wallets” and receive “supported” tokens from external addresses, the company said in a Sept. 25 press release.
“Today’s announcement is PayPal’s latest step to increase cryptocurrency’s utility by making increased functionality available to millions of merchants in the U.S.,” the company stated, adding that the service will be unavailable to business clients in New York State when it launches.
Paypal indicated that it made the move because business owners asked for it.
“Business owners have increasingly expressed a desire for the same cryptocurrency capabilities available to consumers,” said Jose Fernandez da Ponte, the senior vice president of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and digital currencies at PayPal.
PayPal Enters The Stablecoin Fray
PayPal has made inroads into the crypto sector over the years, first allowing customers to buy and sell cryptocurrencies in 2020 and then rolling out its own U.S. dollar-denominated stablecoin, PYUSD, last year.
The payments giant later deployed PYUSD on Solana — citing the blockchain’s fast speeds and significantly lower costs. Paypal hopes that these cheaper transaction costs will spur the use of PYUSD for smaller purchases like coffee or lunch at an eatery.
More recently, PYUSD reached a $1 billion market cap. Nonetheless, it still lags behind dollar-backed stablecoins Tether’s USDT and USDC. Data tracked by CoinGecko shows that the two top stablecoins boast market caps of roughly $119.3 billion and $36 billion, respectively.
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