PayPal To Begin Allowing Bitcoin Withdrawals
In an announcement during Coindesk's Consensus Conference on Wednesday, PayPal's head of cryptocurrency, Jose Fernandez da Ponte, said that the company will soon be letting its users send Bitcoin and other cryptos out of PayPal.
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PayPal plans to add support for third-party wallet transfers which will allow the platform's users to move cryptocurrencies out of PayPal and into private wallets.
This will also apply to Venmo users who will be able to withdrawal cryptocurrency from the app and send it to other wallets or services. Soon, both Venmo and PayPal users will be able to send cryptocurrencies to each other. Da Ponte did not give further details about when PayPal and Venmo plan to integrate this feature.
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The decision likely stems from the higher demand that PayPal's crypto services have gotten from what it was expecting. In a late April interview with TIME Magazine PayPal's CEO, Dan Schulman, said that demand for digital assets on the platform had more than exceeded the company's expectations.
"Demand on the crypto side has been mulitple-fold to what we initially expected. There's a lot of excitement," said Schulman.
Schulman added that PayPal had been looking at distributed ledger technology (DLT) and cryptocurrency for years but that they were too volatile and risky to incorporate into their platform.
"We’ve been looking at digital forms of currency and DLT for six years or so. But I thought it was early, and I thought the cryptocurrencies at the time were much more assets than they were currency. They were too volatile to be a viable currency," said Schulman.
Now that the company has integrated cryptocurrency and seen such demand crypto could become a more permanent fixture within the PayPal and Venmo platforms.
