According to an official announcement, PayPal has launched enterprise-level cryptocurrency accounts, providing U.S. merchants (except New York State) with the ability to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrencies directly through PayPal business accounts. Additionally, PayPal allows U.S. business owners to transfer cryptocurrencies to eligible third-party wallets, and these business account holders can now interact with external blockchain addresses to send and receive PayPal-powered cryptocurrencies.
Jose Fernandez da Ponte, Vice President of Blockchain and Digital Currency at PayPal, said:
“Since launching the feature that allows PayPal and Venmo users to manage cryptocurrencies in their wallets, more businesses have expressed a desire to use cryptocurrencies in the same way as consumers, and we’ve responded to that need by making it easy for them to do so. Use cryptocurrency services.
The impact of PayPal’s corporate opening on cryptocurrencies
As the adoption rate of enterprise-level cryptocurrency accounts increases, PayPal is expected to increase the acceptance of cryptocurrency in the mainstream financial system, further expanding the potential audience of cryptocurrency; in addition, cryptocurrency will also help reduce PayPal’s transaction costs and shorten settlement Over time, this advantage will promote the penetration of cross-border payments on a global scale, thereby driving more companies to adopt cryptocurrency as a solution and laying the foundation for large-scale adoption.
PayPal actively expands its Web3 territory
In recent years, PayPal has continued to take significant measures to respond to the increasing use of cryptocurrency. They launched cryptocurrency services for the first time in 2020, allowing PayPal and Venmo customers to use wallets to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrency; in 2023 PayPal stablecoin provider Paxos cooperated to issue the US dollar stablecoin PayPal USD ($PYUSD), expanding its territory to DeFi; recently, PayPal also cooperated with the Ethereum domain name project ENS to provide customers with the function of using domain names for encrypted payments. This series of moves shows that the payments giant is trying to get ahead of the wave of Web3 adoption.
PayPal’s size in the DeFi sector
Speaking of PayPal's application in Web3, the one closest to DeFi users is its stable currency $PYUSD. At the time of writing, the market value of $PYUSD is US$703 million, distributed across the two blockchain mainnets of Ethereum and Solana, with a share of 49.6% (US$349 million) and 50.4% (US$354 million) respectively.
Figure source: DefiLlama $PYUSD share distribution
On the other hand, the total market value of all stablecoins is now US$172.3 billion, of which $USDT and $USDC, the top two market shares, have market values of US$119.2 billion and US$35.8 billion respectively; in comparison, $PYUSD ranks second among stablecoins. The share of the sector is obviously limited, ranking only 7th overall in terms of market capitalization, which also shows that $PYUSD still has broad room for growth.
Image source: DefiLlama $PYUSD market capitalization ranking
