PayPal To Allow US Customers To Pay With Crypto At 29 Million Online Merchants

Paypal Holdings Inc PYPL has moved to allow its U.S. customers to use their cryptocurrency holdings to pay at millions of online merchants around the globe.

What Happened: The company said that with this Checkout with Crypto service, customers who have Bitcoin BTC/USD, Ether ETH/USD, Bitcoin Cash BCH/USD or Litecoin in their PayPal digital wallets would be able to convert their digital assets into fiat currencies at checkout in order to make purchases, according to Reuters.

“This is the first time you can seamlessly use cryptocurrencies in the same way as a credit card or a debit card inside your PayPal wallet,” President and CEO Dan Schulman told Reuters.

The company is expected to make a formal announcement later today regarding its “Checkout with Crypto” service.

Why It Matters: PayPal first announced support for cryptocurrencies in October 2020, where U.S. customers were able to purchase, sell and hold crypto directly from their PayPal accounts.

The Checkout with Crypto service is expected to significantly boost the global acceptance of cryptocurrencies as a means of payment as the service will be available at all of PayPal’s 29 million merchants in the months to come.

The move also comes a day after payments giant Visa Inc V said it would allow payments to be settled directly via cryptocurrency on the Ethereum blockchain.

Bitcoin was trading at $59,153 at press time, having surged over 1.6% in the 30 minutes that followed PayPal’s news. Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash, which are included in PayPal’s list of supported cryptocurrencies, also traded higher after the news.