PayPal Users can now Trade Crypto in US

PayPal announced today that all of its users from the U.S. can now start trading Bitcoin on its platform.

“We are pleased to announce that all eligible PayPal account holders in the U.S. can now buy, hold and sell cryptocurrency directly with PayPal,” the company noted in a statement, making an update to its former announcement in late October.

The company had introduced a waitlist for its crypto features but said that it had experienced overwhelming demand for services from its users.

Last October 21, 2020, the firm announced that it would soon support Bitcoin (BTC), ethereum (ETH), bitcoin cash (BCH), and litecoin (LTC). The company said that the customers would be able to buy, sell, and hold virtual assets.

On November 2, 2020, Dan Schulman, PayPal CEO, discussed the company’s cryptocurrency support during a call. He revealed the plans for Venmo support and improved crypto-asset purchasing limits to $15k.

And now, PayPal users from the U.S. can use cryptocurrencies to buy things from any of the 26M merchants worldwide. The merchants won’t receive cryptocurrencies because PayPal will convert the crypto at the point of sale.

Moreover, it is not possible to move the currencies out of a PayPal account; the platform holds the cryptocurrency on its users’ behalf.

PayPal supports four cryptocurrencies during the launch: Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum. It plans to expand the features to Venmo and “select international markets” by the first half of 2021.

After PayPal CEO revealed the increase of purchasing limits to $15,000 last week, the company raised the limit again to $20,000 last Thursday. “Due to initial demand from our customers, we’ve also increased our weekly cryptocurrency purchase limit from $10K/week to $20K/week,” Paypal said.

Twitter users tweeted about receiving a message from PayPal that saying that the platform’s crypto services were now available to all U.S. customers.