PayPal's New 'Super App' Will Come With Added Crypto Capabilities

Paypal Holdings Inc PYPL will soon roll out a new version of its digital wallet interface, called the “super app”, which will include increased functionality with cryptocurrencies.

What Happened: In an earnings call on Wednesday, PayPal’s President and Chief Executive Officer Dan Schulman told analysts that the super app was already code-complete and would include 25 new capabilities, including high-yield savings, early access to direct deposit funds, and additional crypto capabilities.

“We continue to be really pleased with the momentum we're seeing on crypto. And we're, obviously, adding incremental functionality into that…you probably saw increased limits to $100,000 a week (sic),” said Schulman, referring to its significantly higher crypto purchase limits which took effect last week.

“We're working right now on transfers to third-party wallets, and we really want to make sure that we create a very seamless process for taxes and tax reporting. And so we're really looking at how do we integrate that into both the trading and the buy with crypto on our platform,” he added.

In April, PayPal’s mobile payment service Venmo introduced the option to buy as little as $1 in crypto.

Today, Venmo has 76 million active accounts and reported around $58 billion in total payment volume over the second quarter of 2021.

Schulman noted that while all of this is interesting, it isn’t the main course of action for the company’s blockchain and digital currency business unit.

“We are clearly thinking about what the next generation of the financial system looks like, how we can help shape that,” he said.

“How can we use smart contracts more efficiently? How can we digitize assets and open those up to consumers that may not have had access to that before? There are some interesting DeFi applications as well. And so we are working really hard.”

Price Action: At press time, the leading digital asset Bitcoin BTC/USD was trading at $39,785, losing 0.63% over the past 24-hours.

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