According to the head of blockchain and cryptocurrency at PayPal, Jose Fernandez da Ponte, the online payments giant will be adding support for transfers of bitcoin off of the platform and to third-party wallets.
According to a report from Decrypt, Fernandez da Ponte made the announcement at the Consensus conference earlier today.
“We want to make it as open as possible,” he said, per the report. “We understand there is more utility to those tokens if you can move them around, so we are definitely exploring how we can let people transfer crypto to and from their PayPal addresses.”
He did not clarify when exactly the feature would be added.
PayPal garnered significant attention late last year when it announced that its users could buy, sell and hold bitcoin on its platform. Last month, its mobile payments subsidiary Venmo made a similar announcement. But the fact that users had to keep their bitcoin on the platforms meant that, ultimately, the bitcoin would not belong to them.
The ability to transfer bitcoin from PayPal or Venmo to a third-party wallet, for which the user controls the private keys, would mean that these mainstream financial platforms could truly bring bitcoin to an unprecedented amount of people.
