Could Online Payment Companies Provide a Tipping Point for Mass Crypto Adoption? Part 1

Table of Contents

• PayPal Abandons Libra, But Not Crypto?

• Skrill CEO Lorenzo Pellegrino gave a crypto-centric interview to CEO Insider.
• Revolut boss Nikolay Stornorov has been talking about his firm’s expansion plans.

Online payment company execs have been featuring in the press lately, and cryptocurrency is a recurring topic of conversation. PayPal CEO Dan Schulman spoke to Fortune magazine about his firm’s abandonment of the Libra project, Skrill CEO Lorenzo Pellegrino gave a crypto-centric interview to CEO Insider, and Revolut boss Nikolay Stornorov has been talking about his firm’s expansion plans. So, what’s being said, and what does it mean for the future of cryptocurrency? 

PayPal Abandons Libra, But Not Crypto?

A month after the Libra Association lost pretty much all of its partners in the payments sector, Dan Schulman broke his silence over PayPal’s decision to do a u-turn on the project. In an interview with Fortune, Schulman denied that it was due to pressure being piled on by regulators. Instead, he explained the decision: 

“As we learned more about [Libra] and saw the amount of things that were still left to do and the amount of things we still had to do on our own roadmap outside of Libra, we said, “You know, we think if we focus on our own roadmap, we’d be able to advance financial inclusion faster than if we put all these resources against Libra.”” 

He stopped well shy of confirming that his company is developing something that could be deemed competitive to Libra. However, later in the interview, he also stated: 

“You can think of use cases in different countries and different places where [cryptocurrency] can be more stable than the alternatives.”

The intense regulatory scrutiny of Libra is likely to deter any company from implementing its own cryptocurrency. On the other hand, much of that pressure has come from the US, Europe, Japan, and other more economically developed countries. 

If PayPal is considering some kind of proprietary digital asset, is it more likely that this is targeted at countries suffering from economic instability? It’s already well known that people in countries such as Venezuela and Zimbabwe turn to cryptocurrencies as a safe haven investment. Perhaps some kind of corporate stablecoin could be a tipping point for mass adoption in the developing world.