ENS Labs’ recent partnership with PayPal and Venmo could significantly boost crypto payment adoption and help the industry reach the first billion crypto holders.

ENS, also known as the Web3, human-readable crypto address, was recently integrated by payment giants Venmo and PayPal — the world’s most widely used payment acquirer — enabling easier crypto transactions via ENS usernames.

The new integration could unlock the mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency payments, according to Marta Cura, director of business development at ENS Labs.

The partnership is the first step in unifying Web2 and Web3 users, Cura told Cointelegraph in an exclusive interview:

“The integration within PayPal and Venmo goes way beyond ENS. It'll translate and it'll open up use cases with different payment providers, hopefully with different types of business models and e-commerce.”

ENS’ Marta Cura, interview with Cointelegraph’s Zoltan Vardai. Source: YouTube

ENS names replace complex, 42-character-long hexadecimal Ethereum-based crypto addresses with simple nicknames, such as “Thomas.” eth,” which simplifies transactions and reduces the risk of human error.

ENS names are approaching the two million mark, with a total of 1.94 million ENS names created by over 888,000 unique participants, according to Dune data.

ENS names dashboard. Source: Dune

Mainstream crypto adoption still needs TradFi 

Unifying both Web2 and Web3 users will need blockchain solutions with real-world utility.

However, crypto payment adoption will also rely on the adoption from traditional finance (TradFi) companies, explained ENS’ Cura:

“We need to take a step back from the speed that we're used to and work with the existing railways of traditional finance.”

ENS’ Marta Cura, interview with Cointelegraph’s Zoltan Vardai, clip 2. Source: YouTube

Cura added that Web3 could benefit from the influence of traditional financial players, but partnering with TradFi firms takes longer due to the stringent approval and governance procedures in place.

ENS names could stop address poisoning scams

The improved user experience introduced by ENS’ Web3 usernames could put an end to the growing instances of address poisoning scams.

Address poisoning, or address spoofing, is a deception trick in which scammers send a small number of digital assets to a wallet that closely resembles the potential victim’s address to make it part of the wallet’s transaction history, hoping that the victim will accidentally copy and send funds to their address.

At the beginning of May, an unfortunate trader lost $68 million in an address-poisoning scam due to a single transaction that sent most of his assets to a fraudulent wallet.

The near $70 million loss could have easily been avoided with an ENS username, explained Cure:

“This entire situation could have been easily avoidable had this person just used an ENS name. And $70 million, that's such a huge loss… Every single day there's people being drained of their funds because they didn't see that that one character was wrong.”

In a fortunate but mysterious turn of events, the thief returned the $68 million on May 13, after numerous onchain investigators started shedding light on his potential Hong Kong-based IP addresses.

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