PayPal Wants to Be a CBDC Distributor

PayPal could be to central bank digital currencies (CBDC) what private banks are to physical dollars.

The company’s CEO, Dan Schulman, laid out a vision during its investor day on Thursday for PayPal’s digital wallets being the means by which central banks distributed CBDCs to consumers across income levels.

“You think about how many [digital wallets] we’re going to have in the next two, three or five years, and we’re a perfect complement to central banks and governments to distribute those digitized forms of currency,” Schulman said.

Schulman also revealed that PayPal is looking into smart contracts and tokenizations of other non-crypto assets.

“This is a once in a multi-decade opportunity where the fundamental rails of the system are going to be redefined and we have a chance to help shape that,” Schulman said.

The company also released new numbers around the transaction activity of its customers who use its crypto products.

PayPal customers that use its crypto services have a 12% increase in weekly transactions on the platform. This is in part because more than 40% of the U.S. PayPal customers who use crypto return to complete more than two additional transactions, the company said.