Crypto fans around the world were excited to hear last October that PayPal would soon be allowing users to purchase and store cryptocurrencies through the trading platform. In addition, PayPal said that it was on the verge of allowing customers to pay for items and services with digital currencies. PayPal Is Changing Things Up a Bit This got things hopping up and down and the bitcoin boom ultimately began, though things came with a catch as users soon began to find out the “darker side” of the company’s crypto operations. While the digital assets they purchased and stored were in their names, users of PayPal could not move their crypto to other platforms, nor were they ever given the private keys that would have granted them access to these currencies. This made many
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Crypto fans around the world were excited to hear last October that PayPal would soon be allowing users to purchase and store cryptocurrencies through the trading platform. In addition, PayPal said that it was on the verge of allowing customers to pay for items and services with digital currencies.
PayPal Is Changing Things Up a Bit
This got things hopping up and down and the bitcoin boom ultimately began, though things came with a catch as users soon began to find out the “darker side” of the company’s crypto operations. While the digital assets they purchased and stored were in their names, users of PayPal could not move their crypto to other platforms, nor were they ever given the private keys that would have granted them access to these currencies.
This made many people question PayPal’s intentions, and it was believed – at least for a time – that PayPal was trying to prevent true ownership of digital currencies. The company had set up what appeared to be a very centralized method of providing crypto services to its customers, which ultimately went against everything that bitcoin and its crypto cousins stood for.
This did not sit well with people, who felt that ownership of digital currency was what it took to retain full financial freedom. Today, it appears PayPal has heard these complaints and is changing up its operations a bit. The company has announced that in the coming future, users would be able to transfer their crypto assets to third party wallets.
This is a huge step forward in that all PayPal users who were utilizing the company to store their crypto now officially own whatever it was they purchased. The news was confirmed by Jose Fernandez de Ponte, the vice president of the company’s blockchain division, and while he did not confirm a date in which this service will be ready and available, he has mentioned that users can look forward to this feature relatively soon.
A Desire for Openness
In a statement, he mentioned:
We understand there is more utility to those tokens if you can move them around. We want to make it as open as possible, and we want to give choice to our consumers, something that will let them pay in any way they want to pay. They want to bring their crypto to us so they can use it in commerce, and we want them to be able to take the crypto they acquired with us and take it to the destination of their choice.
Other trading platforms like Revolut took a similar approach to PayPal at one point and did not permit users to transfer their crypto assets to other companies, though the former made the announcement in early May that this was going to change due to regular criticism and backlash from customers.