PayPal Looks To Make Crypto Payments Faster  

PayPal looks to increase the adoption of cryptocurrency as a payment method by recently filing for a patent application.

CoinDesk, citing an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office titled “Expedited Virtual Currency Transaction System,” lays out a method by which private keys are traded from buyer to seller in an effort to cut down on the time it takes for payments to go through between a customer and a merchant. With the patent application, PayPal aims to avoid sending a transaction and waiting for it to be added to the next block.  In order to achieve that, PayPal said in the patent that a secondary wallet would be created to store the private keys for both sellers and buyers.

“The systems and methods of the present disclosure practically eliminate the amount of time the payee must wait to be sure they will receive a virtual currency payment in a virtual currency transaction by transferring to the payee private keys that are included in virtual currency wallets that are associated with predefined amounts of virtual currency that equal a payment amount identified in the virtual currency transaction,” the patent application stated, according to CoinDesk.

The patent application comes as PayPal is upbeat about the future for blockchain, the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies. In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal over the weekend, PayPal Chief Financial Officer John Rainey said the current volatility with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies makes it impossible to be a reliable currency for purchase. After all, merchants can have a 10 percent profit margin one day from accepting bitcoin and then see the value decline 15 percent the next day.

Still, Rainey believes there is a “very high likelihood” it will become a popular payment method in the future. “The technology — there is real merit to it. I do think, though, it will be years down the road before we see the kind of ubiquity and acceptance that makes it a form of currency that is used every day,” said Rainey, noting that PayPal was an early adopter of bitcoin as a payment method.