On Thursday, PayPal announced the end of its waitlist to buy, hold, and sell cryptocurrency in the United States.
The ability to use PayPal to transact in crypto was already partially available in the US before yesterday, but the company had been onboarding interested customers via a waitlist.
With the update, customers will no longer have to wait for a spot to open and they can now purchase cryptocurrency straight from their PayPal accounts.
The company reportedly will alert customers to the new feature through both an email and a push notification in the coming days.
The news was welcome in the crypto space, which has enjoyed no end of bullish news lately. Well-known crypto investor Ryan Sean Adams tweeted “to the 346 million PayPal users…Welcome to the party.”
However, fintech’s original OG did not make its entrance without a few potential blushes. As Dan Ardle, the co-founder of Messari crypto pointed out on Twitter, some of PayPal’s crypto information was less than accurate.
McArdle’s tweet garnered a significant response. Alex Gladstein, the chief strategy officer for the Human Rights Foundation, commented:
“This is astonishing. It’s almost 2021”
Another user remarked:
“we’re just here to collect fees, we don’t really care what any of these things are.”
Yet another chimed in, “it’s completely dishonest pitching BCH and LTC like this.” Neeraj Agrawal of the cryptocurrency think-tank CoinCenter also weighed in, but was slightly more charitable:
“I’m happy about PayPal, but damn this is really bad. PayPal hire me I can save you”
