PayPal confirmed yesterday that it would buy the Israel-based Curv, a provider of cloud-based infrastructure for digital asset securities.
The exact financial information of the deal wasn’t divulged, but PayPal wants to use Curv to “accelerate and expand its initiatives to support cryptocurrencies and digital assets.”
“The acquisition of Curv is part of our effort to invest in the talent and technology to realize our vision for a more inclusive financial system,” confirmed Jose Fernandez da Ponte, the VP and general manager of blockchain, crypto, and digital currencies of PayPal.
“During our conversations with Curv’s team, we’ve been impressed by their technical talent, entrepreneurial spirit, and the thinking behind the technology they’ve built in the last few years. We’re excited to welcome the Curv team to PayPal,” he added.
Itay Malinger, the CEO and co-founder of Curv commented: “Now, as the adoption of digital assets accelerates, we feel there’s no better home than PayPal to continue our journey of innovation.”
It was revealed that the deal will be completed sometime during the first half of this year.
PayPal is Crypto-Friendly
PayPal started to collaborate with Paxos in October 2020 in order to offer the possibility of buying or selling crypto. It was already known that the company was looking for a crypto custody acquisition, and it even almost bought BitGo for $750 million, but the deal wasn’t sealed.
Multi-party computation (MPC) shops such as Curv or Fireblocks are rather rare in the land of crypto – meanwhile, the latter is allegedly working on crypto custody with BNY Mellon.
Curv had previously refused an offer to be bought by Facebook’s crypto arm, Novi. Currently, Curv is working with some of the most important crypto firms in Europe, such as FalconX and eToro, which may indicate that PayPal is really serious regarding the idea of spreading its crypto footprint outside North America.