PayPal is diving deeper into the crypto world.
In a Thursday announcement, the payments giant said that U.S. customers could now buy digital coins and tokens like Bitcoin and Ethereum on MoonPay using their Venmo accounts.
Venmo is a popular mobile payments app owned by PayPal. MoonPay is a platform allowing people to buy, sell, or swap digital coins and tokens. Venmo customers can use their account balance, a direct bank withdrawal, or debit card to fund crypto purchases on MoonPay, however MoonPay said that users in New York and Texas cannot use the Venmo integration.
The announcement is part of PayPal's latest strategy to make crypto available to everyday people. In September, the payments company enabled U.S. merchants to buy, hold, and sell cryptocurrency from their business accounts.
Last year, it launched an Ethereum-based, dollar-pegged stablecoin called PayPal USD (PYUSD). The asset now also runs on Solana, the crypto network behind the fifth-biggest digital coin by market cap, SOL. In April, PayPal announced that users could swap PYUSD for dollars to make international payments via payments platform Xoom.
Online payment giant PayPal is expanding its cryptocurrency offerings, joining forces with cryptocurrency company MoonPay to offer its more than 426 million customers access to over 100 digital assets.
MoonPay believes that it will help avoid the kinds of banking hurdles that some users have encountered with crypto purchases.
“Frequently, crypto purchases fail when users attempt to use their debit cards directly due to certain bank restrictions,” a MoonPay spokesperson said. “MoonPay's partnersh...
Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies that are designed to have a less volatile nature than Bitcoin and other digital coins. They tend to be backed by dollars or treasuries, and are used by traders to make transactions on exchanges quickly, or by those who want to send money across borders.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
Daily Debrief Newsletter
Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.