Visa, PayPal to Allow Customers to Pay With Cryptocurrency

March
30, 2021

2 min read

Visa and PayPal recently announced that they would allow the use of cryptocurrency on their platforms.

According to Reuters, Visa said yesterday that it would allow customers to specifically use the cryptocurrency USD Coin in transactions made across its payment network. Visa told the news wire that it launched a pilot program with Crypto.com — a crypto platform — and will seek out other partners later this year. 

Related: Why Small Businesses Should Consider Bitcoin

“We see increasing demand from consumers across the world to be able to access, hold and use digital currencies and we’re seeing demand from our clients to be able to build products that provide that access for consumers,” Cuy Sheffield, Visa’s head of crypto, said in a statement. 

Visa’s latest move is expected to make transactions easier, as customers with the Crypto.com Visa card had to convert the digital currency into hard money before any transaction could take place. The new system, which relies on the ethereum blockchain, would allow customers to simply pay with digital currency — without the need for conversion. 

As The Verge points out, PayPal announced today that U.S. customers can also now pay with Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin or Bitcoin Cash. Any payment made in cryptocurrency will immediately be converted to U.S. dollars in order to complete a transaction. The publication further points out that the crypto-payment feature is set to automatically appear in the PayPal wallet if a user has a “sufficient cryptocurrency balance to cover an eligible purchase.” 

Both Visa and PayPal are joining a growing number of companies that are making cryptocurrencies an accepted form of payment. Earlier this month, Tesla announced that it would accept Bitcoin as payment. In 2018, PayPal’s competitor Square launched a feature for Bitcoin on its Cash App.