PayPal has confirmed that it has entered the crypto market in the United Kingdom and will give users the ability to hold, buy, and sell coins when its service starts rolling out in the coming week. Customers can acquire four types of cryptos including Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum, and can manage to view real-time crypto prices.
It follows the company’s announcement in 2021 that cryptos would become an authorized payment type on its service, which made the price of many cryptocurrencies surge. Customers and other users can buy crypto worth as little as £1 through PayPal and can even fund the purchases directly from their PayPal accounts.
While no fees will be charged to hold crypto in a PayPal account, various transaction fees are always linked to cryptos and currency conversion fees for moving to a different coin.
The high transactions prices are one of the major shortcomings of popular coins like BTC and this can change rapidly. Currently, a transaction is set to cost about $3 (£2.19) even though it surged to more than $60 for a short time in April 2021. Jose Fernandez da Ponte of PayPal’s cryptocurrency department said:
“The pandemic has accelerated digital change and innovation across all aspects of our lives – including the digitization of money and greater consumer adoption of digital financial services. Our global reach, digital payments expertise, and knowledge of consumer and businesses, combined with rigorous security and compliance controls provides us the unique opportunity, and the responsibility, to help people in the UK to explore cryptocurrency.”
Fernandez added:
“We are committed to continuing working closely with regulators in the UK, and around the world, to offer our support—and meaningfully contribute to shaping the role digital currencies will play in the future of global finance and commerce.”
PayPal said that the new service will start rolling out this week in the United Kingdom and be available to all the eligible clients within the coming several weeks. But the UK users are still unable to make purchases at the participating businesses using cryptos, unlike the account holders in the United States.
In July 2021, the European Commission proposed that crypto transactions need to be made traceable, to help the regulators and authorities investigate money laundering. These proposals would effectively expand the financial rules that govern the traditional financial service providers to cover crypto service providers.
