Paypal announced last week that it would be enabling PayPal account holders to buy, store and sell cryptocurrency like bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum and Litecoin over its network.

The service will be made available to US customers in the coming weeks but customers in the UK and other countries outside of the US will need to wait till early ’21 for the same service.

The introduction of cryptocurrency to PayPal will make them one of the biggest and most significant adopters of the tech in the financial sector. Unlike other competitors though, PayPal haven’t limited their adoption to just Bitcoin.

In a statement, they say they hope the new service will encourage digital currency usage around the globe.

Some central banks have already started to think along similar lines, developing digital versions of their currencies after Facebook announced their crypto project, Project Libra, back in ’19. PayPal was actually one of the founding members of that project but pulled out after a few months.

Their current venture into cryptocurrency is through a collaboration with Paxos Trust and they’ve already received their first cryptocurrency license from the New York State Department of Financial Services.

Although PayPal has 346 million active accounts globally and processed over $222 billion in Q2 of 2020 alone, their entrance to the cryptocurrency market took come with a big sticking point… All their cryptocurrency payments will have to be settled in traditional currencies like sterling, which means merchants won't actually touch incoming digital currency. It also means users won’t be able to send cryptocurrency in their wallet to other PayPal users, so all cryptocurrency on the PayPal network will have to stay there.