The new crown virus pandemic is forcing shoppers out of stores and people are starting to hate contact payments. The cashless society is gradually influencing the current shopping environment. People are now shopping on their phones and computers, making electronic payments, increasing social media networks, video sharing and so on to avoid contact.
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Against this backdrop, fintech giant PayPal has had a record year.
PayPal operates in more than 200 countries and transacts more than 100 currencies. It had a huge volume of business last year, handling 1,000 transactions per second during the holiday shopping season. Last year, PayPal processed 15.4 billion payments totaling $936 billion. PayPal is also learning from competitors such as Alipay and WeChat, two Chinese tech giants that have helped drive China’s cashless society. PayPal has launched its latest product, QR code scanning payment, in response to the demand for aseptic transactions.
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Dan Schulman, chief executive of PayPal, recently said that demand for cryptocurrencies on the platform was much higher than expected. Schulman claims that demand for cryptocurrencies has doubled, as the company had originally expected.
“The demand for encryption is already several times what we originally expected,” Dan Schulma told TIME, adding, “It’s exciting.”
As a result of the outbreak of new coronaviruses, cryptocurrencies are only part of the overall trend for digitizing daily payments.
Dan Schulman believes that cash and credit card use will decline “dramatically” a decade from now. Instead, most accounting will be done on smartphones and “super apps”.
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PayPal has been making a lot of moves in the cryptocurrency space since the second half of last year. In November, PayPal allowed US users to buy cryptocurrencies directly on the platform. PayPal opened the door to the use of cryptocurrencies, allowing its 300 million customers to consume the cryptocurrencies they hold with millions of their suppliers.
In late March, PayPal announced that it would allow U.S. consumers to use digital cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin to make payments at millions of online merchants around the world.
Venmo, the mobile payment software owned by PayPal, announced on April 20 that it has launched cryptocurrency transactions on its platform, a move that will allow users to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrencies within its app.
PayPal’s growing interest in further growing its cryptocurrency business says a lot about the future of cryptocurrency payments and the role cryptocurrencies play in it.
Part of the article quoted by: Time