On October 21, news about a PayPal Holdings Inc. launch of Bitcoin payments on its platform started making rounds.
The news was positively received by industry leads and the entire crypto market. Mike Novogratz, Galaxy Digital CEO and multimillionaire joined the discussion by taking an interview on CNBC Squawk Box. During the interview, he detailed the importance of the upcoming PayPal 2021 Bitcoin launch.
Reuters made the announcement on Oct.21 that PayPal was joining the cryptocurrency market by allowing customers to buy, sell and hold Bitcoins and other virtual coins using the U.S. digital payments company’s online wallets. According to the news, PayPal customers will also have the opportunity to shop at 26 million merchants on the PayPal network starting early 2021 with the use of cryptocurrencies.
Novogratz said on Oct. 23, “I think that’s, in some ways, the shot heard around the world on Wall Street. PayPal has 346 million accounts. They are the 30th biggest bank in the U.S. in deposits and all of a sudden every financial institution says, ‘Wait a minute, what am I doing?’”
According to Novogratz, people in the boardroom at Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs or Bank of America are thinking how to get involved with crypto. He added by saying that prior to his interview, he had looked at stock performance for companies in the crypto space and Ethereum’s price and noted that these assets had posted standout price gains.
Novogratz said that over the next 10 years we would experience a rebuilding of the financial infrastructure in the country. He also noted that PayPal’s hiring of Paxos to do their integration with crypto was interesting since there is a need for a domain expertise in the blockchain space.
After the PayPal announcement, Bitcoin surged in price, ultimately overtaking the market cap of PayPal itself.
At the time of the announcement, Bitcoin’s market value was close to $240 billion, and was holding position 22 on a list of top 100 stocks, exchange traded funds and cryptocurrencies. The crypto was a single position behind PayPal.
The announcement made for a bullish market, which caused an increase in the price of the crypto. Currently, Bitcoin holds the 21st position on the list while Paypal is on position 23.
PayPal is not the only financial player that has joined the cryptocurrency industry. Multiple traditional financial players have picked up large stocks in Bitcoin especially, which has ushered in an age of mainstream BTC adoption.
Image courtesy of Flickr
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