PayPal CEO Schulman: Consumers Moving To Digital Currency In Droves

Consumers are moving to digital payments and cryptocurrency in droves, and it’s inevitable that more central banks will issue digital forms of currency, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman said in a televised interview on Monday (Nov. 23).

“There’s no question that people are flocking to digital payments and digital forms of currency,” Schulman told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Schulman said it’s not a matter of if, but “when and how you’ll start to see more and more central banks issue forms of digital currencies. And I think you’ll have more and more utility happen with cryptocurrencies,” he predicted.

The news comes as PayPal announced that it had jumped into the digital currency business and would now let clients purchase, keep and sell cryptocurrency straight from their PayPal accounts. The firm also noted that it intends to let clients use digital currencies to shop at the 26 million merchants on its network beginning early next year.

PayPal also said at the time that it had received a “first-of-its-kind conditional Bitlicense” from the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS).

A published report in October indicated that PayPal was eyeing acquisition possibilities for digital currency firms, among them the bitcoin custodian BitGo.

PayPal and Square’s Cash App cryptocurrency purchasing spree had reportedly led to a bitcoin rally, according to a Monday (Nov. 23) Benzinga report.

After looking at numbers from the itBit digital currency exchange, Pantera Capital said in a report that it seems PayPal and Cash App have purchased nearly all of the newly issued bitcoins. Paxos, PayPal’s partner, operates itBit.

Pantera Capital said in the report, as noted by Benzinga, “When PayPal went live, volume started exploding. The increase in itBit volume implies that within four weeks of going live, PayPal is already buying almost 70 percent of the new supply of bitcoins.”

PayPal isn’t the first large name in tech to jump on the digital currency bandwagon. The Robinhood trading app has allowed digital currency as of 2018, and Square users have had the capacity to trade in digital currency for more than a year.