PayPal Adds Xapo CEO Wences Casares to Board of Directors

| Updated
by Tatsiana Yablonskaya · 3 min read
PayPal Adds Xapo CEO Wences Casares to Board of Directors
Photo: TechCrunch/Flickr

Casares’s appointment increased PayPal’s board to 9 members.

PayPal has appointed a remarkable entrepreneur to its Board of Directors. Wences Casares, CEO of bitcoin wallet provider Xapo and passionate technology enthusiast, joined PayPal’s Compensation Committee. The appointment took place on January 12, 2015. Casares became the 9th member of PayPal’s board.

Casares deserves to be named an advocate of bitcoin evolution. His latest project Xapo is the one of the industry’s hottest bitcoin startups with $40-million funding from a number of well-known Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs, including PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, former PayPal CEO David Marcus, Greylock Partners, and Benchmark. The company offers customers to purchase bitcoins and manage them in a digital wallet.

Prior to Xapo, Casares founded Argentina’s first Internet service provider and a gaming company (afterwards acquired by Activision) as well as digital wallet startup Lemon (current owner is LifeLock involved in a lawsuit with Casares).

Casares supports also non-profit organizations. He is a member of the board of Endeavor, a non-profit organization that promotes high-impact entrepreneurship in emerging markets, and Kiva, a non-profit organization with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty worldwide.

Dan Schulman, President and CEO of PayPal, greeted his new partner: “I join PayPal’s directors and the entire PayPal team in welcoming Wences to our Board. His unique line of sight into the future of commerce is ideally aligned with PayPal’s vision of transforming the management and movement of money for people around the globe.”

PayPal is one of the world’s largest Internet payment companies. It was founded in 1998 and for these years has earned the reputation of the most reliable alternative to traditional paper method. PayPal is available to people in 203 markets, allowing customers to get paid in more than 100 currencies, withdraw funds to their bank accounts in 57 currencies and hold balances in their PayPal accounts in 26 currencies.

Only for 2015 PayPal has processed 4 billion payments with almost 173 million active customer accounts all over the world. Indeed PayPal’s team has managed to create an open and secure payments ecosystem allowing people to securely transact with each other online, in stores and on mobile devices.

PayPal has entered several profitable partnerships to perfect its services. Together with payment processors BitPay, Coinbase and GoCoin the company made a big push in helping merchants accept Bitcoin payments. “All three companies have taken steps to ensure that they know their customers and that those customers are offered certain protections. We believe digital goods merchants will be excited to work with these industry-leading companies to sell ringtones, games and music and get paid with Bitcoin”, said PayPal.

Recently Netherlands-based payment service provider Bitwala has presented a new service that will enable users to send digital currency to any PayPal account all over the world. The launch of the feature is a part of Bitwala’s strategy to make payment services available to all bitcoin users. All you need to transfer the funds is a PayPal email address.

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