PayPal processed nearly $2 billion worth of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin trades in May

PayPal’s custodian of crypto funds, itBit, traded over $2.1 billion worth of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and PAX in May, according to data provided by analytics tool Nomics.

Owned by Paxos, itBit is a crypto exchange that provides liquidity for PayPal, a US company operating an online payments system that entered into the crypto market in October 2020.

Daily trading volumes getting five times higher

Paxos’ easy-to-integrate APIs and regulatory framework enabled PayPal, which currently supports four cryptocurrencies, namely Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and  Litecoin (LTC), to enter the crypto market at a massive scale that only a mainstream financial platform can reach.

The itBit exchange has seen significant growth in trading volume recently, suggesting that the PayPal cryptocurrency platform has a high utility among its users. 

It even hit a record $303 million daily trading volume on May 19, right after the broader started to dump. The crypto exchange hit a previous daily trading volume record of almost $240 million in January this year but the company’s maximums were unable to reach $60 million prior to PayPal stepping into the crypto market.

PayPal provoked different reactions last year when it announced that its customers could buy, sell and hold Bitcoin on its platform. At the time, the company didn’t provide support for their user base, which only grew in numbers during the pandemic, to transfer funds to an external wallet, withholding true control of their assets and benefits from immutable transactions. 

Bitcoin exists as a direct response to centralized systems like PayPal. The PoW/energy cost is what frees us from the tyranny of centralized monetary & payment systems that you cherish.

— nic carter (@nic__carter) May 16, 2021

Transfers to third-party wallets

Recently, head of blockchain and cryptocurrency at PayPal, Jose Fernandez da Ponte, announced at the Consensus conference that PayPal and its mobile payments subsidiary Venmo are adding support for transfers of Bitcoin from the platforms to third-party wallets.

“We want to make it as open as possible,” he said, adding, “We understand there is more utility to those tokens if you can move them around, so we are definitely exploring how we can let people transfer crypto to and from their PayPal addresses.”

With more than 3.5 million PayPal users around the world, the ability to transfer cryptocurrency from their platforms to a third-party wallet has the potential of exposing crypto to an unprecedented amount of people.

Like what you see? Subscribe for updates.