Few weeks ago, PayPal made waves in the cryptosphere as it announced that customers would be able to buy, sell and hold bitcoin and other virtual coins using their online wallets.
The company also announced that starting in early 2021, customers would also be able to use their crypto to shop at the 26 million merchants on its network.
This is big news for Bitcoin, so we decided to look back at PayPal’s history with crypto to fully understand the significance of these headlines.
In the Beginning
The PayPal story begins in April 2013, when CEO John Donahoe mentioned in an interview that the company was considering ways to implement bitcoin into their digital transaction network. He said that he had personally been watching bitcoin very closely and expected virtual currency to stay for good.
At the end of 2013, PayPal had 143 million active registered accounts and $6.6 billion in revenue and the news brought potential to the bitcoin economy. For the company, the interest was certainly there — but it was considered exploratory at best — with nothing yet set in stone.
Steps Forward
This interest was cemented in September 2014, when Braintree, a PayPal-subsidiary announced that it intended to release a software development kit that would allow merchants to add bitcoin to their existing payment methods.
