PayPal, a global payments company, is eyeing the United Kingdom and wants to let British customers trade crypto on its new app.
PayPal has done very well out of crypto trading for the period, according to the company’s second-quarter results call on Wednesday. According to CEO Dan Schulman, the United Kingdom is expected to be the next jurisdiction to enable crypto trading.
“Yeah, well, we continue to be really pleased with the momentum we’re seeing on crypto. […] We’re going to launch, hopefully, maybe even next month in the U.K., open up trading there.”
He noted that the company is adding “incremental functionality” to the crypto trading platform, noting that the crypto purchasing limits have already been raised to $100,000 per week on July 15.
According to Schulman, PayPal is also working on an open banking connection, which “will boost the potential to fully integrate it into ACH and conduct speedier payments.”
PayPal’s Automated Clearing House (ACH) is a payment service that allows merchants to receive payments from customers online by debiting their checking or savings accounts directly.
According to Schulman, Venmo’s pay with Venmo revenue increased by 183 percent year over year, and there has been widespread adoption and trading of cryptocurrency on the platform.
Venmo, a PayPal-owned company, began crypto trading services in mid-April to an estimated 70 million customers.
Is it possible to integrate DeFi?
PayPal is looking at “what the next generation of the financial system looks like” in terms of decentralized finance (DeFi), according to Schulman, and how to integrate smart contracts and decentralized apps into the platform:
“How can we use smart contracts more efficiently? How can we digitize assets and open those up to consumers that may not have had access to them before? There are some interesting DeFi applications as well. And so we are working really hard.”
The remarks come as a leaked video from last week’s EthCC conference in Paris that showed that Uniswap, the world’s largest decentralized exchange, has been in discussions with PayPal and other finance firms about DeFi integration.
PayPal’s “super app,” which will have high-yield savings, early access to direct deposit funds, messaging capabilities, and extra crypto functions, is almost set to debut, according to Cointelegraph.