Dan Schulman, the CEO of PayPal, gave an interview for TIME Magazine in which he disclosed that the demand for PayPal’s crypto offering had surpassed initial expectations:
“Demand on the crypto side has been multiple-fold to what we initially expected. There’s a lot of excitement.”
Schulman revealed that PayPal had been keeping an eye on crypto for around six years but that the company waited for more mainstream adoption before starting to offer its own product:
“And it was still a little bit too much of people not really understanding what they were going to get into, and what we really wanted to do is make sure that it became a little more mainstream so that we would work hand in hand with regulators before we put anything out into the market.”
PayPal started offering its US users the possibility of trading and holding crypto in October 2020.
The CEO believes that the financial system will go through notable changes in the next decade as he thinks the current way of things is inefficient: “If you cash a check, it can take three days for you to get your money. If you do an international remittance, it can take seven days to get your money.”
He also added that cash will see a “tremendous decline” and that credit cards will eventually be phased out, as they will be replaced by smartphones.