News of Financial Tech companies Paypal PYPL +3.2% and Venmo potentially looking to roll out crypto purchasing is energizing the digital asset space.
CoinDesk reported that three individuals told them these companies plan to offer “direct sales of cryptocurrency” to their users.
This news is quickly being circulated and discussed on social media.
Here is a visualization of the number of cryptocurrency-specific natural language events which mention Paypal over the last 30 days (Inca Digital data in Splunk Enterprise):
Here is the same analysis for Venmo:
And there is good reason for this buzz.
According to statista.com, Paypal has over 300 million accounts, and Venmo facilitates over $30 billion in payments last quarter.
It still remains to be seen what assets would be listed, or the extent of offered functionality for both Venmo or Paypal. The Venmo competitor, Cash app from Square Inc. (SQ), currently only lists bitcoin, whereas the infamous trading app Robinhood lists a number of digital assets.
Since the listing of Bitcoin on Square’s Cash App, and their obtaining of a bitlicense in 2018, the company reported in their 2020 Q1 Letter to Shareholders that revenue from Bitcoin surpassed fiat transaction services for the first time:
