PayPal CEO Admits Crypto Demand Much Higher Than Expected

In an interview with Time Magazine, Dan Schulman – the CEO of PayPal – talked about his experience running the company, as well as the demand for crypto on his payment platform.

Exponential Demand

With over 15.4 billion transactions carried out, it’s safe to say PayPal had a good run last year. Their move into crypto also seems to have supported the bull run Bitcoin has been on since late autumn of 2020.

When PayPal announced its plans for cryptocurrency adoption, a small shortage of Bitcoin supply occurred due to the unexpected demand.

Although the supply of Bitcoin didn’t dry up (and everything returned to normal within a few days) it seems PayPal still didn’t expect as many new crypto customers as they should have. In the interview, despite not giving out specific figures, Mr Schulman stated that the demand for digital assets exceeded their expectations “multiple-fold”, and that the enthusiasm surrounding the decision was also a welcome surprise.

Schulman also spoke about the decline of paper money and predicted that not only would it be slowly phased out – but the role of banks in the payment landscape will also probably decline. According to Schulman, in the future the majority of transactions will be carried out through “super-apps”.

When all of those things start to happen, then central banks need to rethink monetary policy as well because you can’t just issue more paper money into the system because people aren’t using paper money. In the next 5 to 10 years, you’re going to see more change in the financial system than you have over the past 10 to 20 years.

Dan Schulman, CEO of PayPal

Of course, this isn’t to say fiat will disappear overnight – plenty of people prefer to use cash. However, Schulman may be right: in countries like the Netherlands, there are already shops that don’t accept cash anymore.

In any case, Schulman’s interview seems to indicate that PayPal believe they made a good decision moving into the crypto world, and it looks like they plan to be staying in it for a while.