The craze for digital currency is not showing any signs of slowing down and this has led to the financial companies facing the heat to revamp and give a boost to the services they offer. PayPal Holdings Inc owns Venmo announced in April that it was planning to extend services for the Venmo customers that would enable them to buy, sell and hold cryptocurrencies. The recent offering from the company known as “Cash Back to Crypto”, will allow a user to select from four various coins, namely, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash, according to Bloomberg News.
Together with Venmo, the other financial firms that are getting into crypto include Renaud Laplanche’s Upgrade Inc. This company launched a Bitcoin reward card in July. Robinhood Markets Inc has worked upon its crypto features and another firm that is getting into crypto Stripe Inc allows merchants to accept customer payments is expanding its crypto team, as per Bloomberg News.
Walmart Inc, the retail stalwart is joining in as well. It is slated to introduce the pilot program that will allow buyers to buy Bitcoin at the Coinstar kiosks in some of its stores in the United States.
The many veteran players or the so-called legacy players like Goldman Sachs Group Inc, DBS Group Holdings Ltd, and Bank of New York Mellon Corp are starting to offer crypto-related services and trading. Adding to it the $6.9 trillion US ETF industry is fast-tracking the release of an exchange-traded fund, which is tied to the Bitcoin, following the first futures-based ones from Valkyrie Investments and ProShares started trading in the current week and gathered more than $1 billion as assets.
According to experts, if the investors are planning to get more into crypto that has offered ease of trading and easy accessibility, it is because they have been enjoying the convenience for quite some time now and it is nothing new to them. It is all about a matter of a wide range of benefits and having several things being managed by a single company.
According to Bloomberg News, splitting and sharing payments is still the main feature of the Venmo platform, said a spokesperson from PayPal Holdings. He also said that “part of Venmo’s continued evolution from peer-to-peer payments app to a more holistic offering that our customers rely on in their everyday financial lives”.
One drawback in payment the companies that are offering crypto services is that there are very few that use cryptocurrencies as currency and instead use them mainly for trading and speculating at least as of now.
However, that does not necessarily mean that few new entrants will not be successful in this niche. Although Venmo was launched or introduced this spring, the cryptocurrency wallet of Venmo is already among the top three crypto wallets across the globe. According to Bloomberg News, an active user of this wallet is someone that uses the wallet at least two times in one month, and in this regard, Venmo has 18% of the global share.
The services that are being offered by Venmo can make it possible for being one of the dominant cryptocurrency consumer wallets related to the active users of the wallet that took as little as 18 months to have a considerable number of active users.
Currently, Coinbase Global Inc ranks second in the biggest crypto wallet that is tied to 20% of the share of active users. Presently, Venmo’s parent PayPal is at the number one spot grabbing 21% of the share, while it has been in the markets for a year already as compared to Venmo, which debuted only in April.
Few consumers prefer to send each other Bitcoin and be able to sell and buy crypto through apps. Cash App, developed by Square Inc, which is a mobile payment service generated as much as $2.72 billion as revenue and $55 million in gross profit from the transactions involving Bitcoins during the second quarter and both were up by three times YOY. For the consumers that are interested predominantly in crypto, the digital coins could keep them enticed as well.
