14 DAY TRIAL // PayPal, eBay’s payment system that is widely used around the world, will start accepting bitcoins soon.
“We’re announcing PayPal’s first foray into Bitcoin,” said Bill Ready, chief of the Braintree unit within eBay. During his speech at the Techcrunch Disrupt SF conference, Ready added that over the coming months they’d be allowing merchants to accept bitcoin.
There’s still some ways to go before the process is complete, and it could even take until next year, but it doesn’t change the progress made here.
While there’s yet no indication that bitcoins will be accepted on eBay anytime soon, there’s still some hope that it will soon branch out to this service too, especially since it’s used by a lot more people.
Braintree is a payment processor for mobile and websites and it will work with Coinbase, Bitcoin payments site, to process transactions in the digital currency. The service is used by the likes of Uber, AirBnb and Stubhub, but it’s also available to the over 150 million users PayPal has.
Ready pointed out that tens of thousands of merchants would soon be able to accept payments made in the cryptocurrency too.
This is quite an exciting development since it will make it possible for some of the fastest-growing apps to integrate the cryptocurrency seamlessly. It also makes it possible for PayPal to integrate Bitcoin into its main wallet in the nearby future.
eBay bought Braintree last year
Braintree was purchased by eBay for $800 million (€620 million) last year in an effort to expand the mobile-transaction business. The platform’s users will be able to start accepting bitcoins if they desire it, which obviously doesn’t mean that they’ll actually do this. It is, however, quite important that they’ll be given this option.
Bitcoin has been growingly accepted across the world. Governments have started to give their opinions on the topic. While some have been more lenient, many have outright banned Bitcoins due to its volatility. While today one Bitcoin is valued at $467 (€361), it went as high as $1,200 (€930) several months ago, which makes the concern for people’s wealth quite well founded.
Regardless, many companies are moving with the times and accepting Bitcoin and other crypto currencies.
The news comes as one hacker announced that he has infiltrated an old email address of Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin. Since no one knows if this is a single individual or a group of developers, the hacker is threatening to expose the identity of the Bitcoin creator.