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The mobile payment service Venmo (owned by PayPal) is now letting those who are on the platform purchase and sell cryptocurrency and other digital tokens. This includes some of the larger coins available such as bitcoin, ether, litecoin, and bitcoin cash. The move is yet another example of how cryptocurrency is moving into more of a mainstream audience.
Venmo users now have access to a new part of the app that gives them the ability to invest in these various cryptocurrencies. The minimum amount is $1, which can be used towards a small percentage of each coin. Each purchase can then be shared with other users on Venmo through the app’s social feed.
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This news comes after Venmo’s parent company PayPal also decided to give users the ability to purchase cryptocurrency. PayPal’s move was also significant because it allows anyone to use cryptocurrency in various marketplaces all over the Internet.
Venmo has grown quite significantly in recent years and now has more than 70 million users worldwide. The platform is now quite popular within a younger audience and allows for the easy transferring of cash from one person to another. It has also become increasingly active in partnering with various e-commerce platforms and businesses processing digital payments.
The biggest major competitor in the space, Square, has also allowed users to buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrency on their Cash app. This move certainly considers that component and certainly helps to lessen the gap between the two platforms for those interested in delving into the world of cryptocurrency.
Venmo representatives have maintained that the decision will allow those new to cryptocurrency to easily learn about it via a trusted platform as well as those fluent in the fairly new phenomena. The company’s overall goal is to streamline the process and make it much more simple to participate in a digital revolution that has been somewhat hard to understand up until fairly recently.
It makes perfect sense for PayPal to move Venmo into this area. Cryptocurrency saw a huge boom during the pandemic and has risen to increasingly high values over the past year. A number of businesses have already decided to invest in cryptocurrency such as Tesla and PayPal itself. PayPal recently bought Cury, which is a start-up company in the space. PayPal also decided to create a team that has a strong focus on cryptocurrency and the blockchain.
As far as more of the nitty gritty, Venmo will partner with Paxos to help run its cryptocurrency related operations. PayPal also did this so it was a logical move. Paxos is fairly established in the space and can help Venmo achieve its goals without too much headache overall.
Crypto does have some opposition
Not everyone is completely sold on cryptocurrency, however. The amount of energy it takes to run and operate the equipment necessary with cryptocurrency is fairly high, and a number of coins have faced significant backlash because of this factor. Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently cited this as the main reason for withdrawing his company from receiving bitcoin as a form of payment.
Opponents also cite the volatility of the market as a reason to be wary of future investments. For this reason, a number of skeptics have warned against becoming too reliant on cryptocurrency.
In addition, there are many folks who have been “enthusiasts” of cryptocurrency for years and do not necessarily think Venmo or PayPal are the best places to trade all of the bigger coins. These enthusiasts generally think that this is sort of a watered down version of how to best trade cryptocurrency, though recognize it is another important way to reach a more mainstream audience. For now, only the major coins are available and whether or not PayPal and Venmo continue to keep adding more of the up and coming players in the space is unknown.
Crypto moves towards a more mainstream audience
In the end, though, Venmo are bringing the users a new feature that many are excited to easily be able to use. Receiving a payment from a friend and then turning that into cryptocurrency is now easier than ever for those who choose to do so. Inevitably, other financial institutions will probably follow the wave and allow this kind of transaction to occur on their own unique platforms.
