Ever since Paypal has incorporated cryptocurrency buying/selling feature in its online platform, its use has witnessed a steady increase. During the activity on January 11, Paypal recorded highest cryptocurrency transactions on its platform ever. This comes despite the fact that the cryptocurrency sector suffered a sizeable price decrease in the buildup to January 11.
According to analytics provider Nomics, the flurry of activity on January 11 was around $242 million which is almost double the previous record of around $129 million that was posted on January 6 last week. This shows that in less than a week, the cryptocurrency trading record has been shattered twice on Paypal. It also represents a massive increase of around 950% from the activity observed on January 1.
According to the Twitter influencer:
Retail has arrived. @PayPal cleared $242M in crypto sales yesterday. That’s nearly double the previous record. ✅ #Bitcoin #Ethereum #BullMarket pic.twitter.com/dnoPlADhla
— Alex Saunders (@AlexSaundersAU) January 12, 2021
Paypal, one of the largest payment gateways and service in the world has over 300 million users worldwide. It was quite a boost for the cryptocurrency industry when Paypal announced back in mid 2020 that it would be allowing cryptocurrency sale/purchase on its application. But, any permanent positive impact was dampened by the limitations imposed by Paypal on cryptocurrency users. For instance, they could only use/buy/sell the cryptocurrency through Paypal itself and couldn’t withdraw it to any other wallet. This was quite a big limitation and skeptics believed that this wouldn’t make a lot of difference for the cryptocurrency sector. However, this notion didn’t prove to be accurate as many people are flocking the Paypal app to buy/sell cryptocurrencies and make trades in them. Currently, there are only a handful options available for them to choose from but since most of the trading is done in Bitcoin, it is all good.
So, despite the limited “gated” experience of the cryptocurrency trading features on Paypal, there is still a lot of interest from retail users. So much so that it is now posting new records for fun. Paypal is also in the works to offer cryptocurrency payment services to its 25 million plus retail merchants around the world. If that happens, we can expect a lot of activity on Paypal’s crypto side of things that will dwarf current figures. Paypal is expected to become a big player in the cryptocurrency market despite the obvious shortcomings of its platform.
Image source: pixabay.com
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