By
Temitope Olatunji
April 18th, 2024
Now Coinbase customers from EU and EFTA will have an opportunity to withdraw their fiat funds from the platform to their PayPal accounts.
Coinbase, that is a worldwide-known cryptocurrency exchange and wallet services provider based in the United States, regularly makes headlines. The explanation is simple: the company is actively expanding its services and geography trying to reach the widest audience. What’s more, the results of its activity were noted even by Forbes, as the firm was included in its Fintech 2019 List.
Now we have one more reason to speak about Coinbase. It has announced that residents of European Union as well as people living in the countries of European Free Trade Association (EFTA), which includes Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland, have an opportunity to make fiat currency withdrawals to popular online payment system PayPal.
PayPal Withdrawal Support
Earlier, European customers of this San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange had an opportunity to withdraw their fiat funds only via Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) and UK Faster Payments Scheme (FPS) systems. Though these options are also rather popular in the region, the popularity of PayPal is much higher which means that this option used to be much more demanded.
Nevertheless, it’s not the first experience of Coinbase in collaborating with PayPal. In summer 2016, the platform had integrated support for PayPal for the first time but some technical difficulties became a reason to terminate the service some weeks later.
As Coinspeaker has reported, the platform relaunched PayPal withdrawals for its customers in the U.S. making it possible for them to move their U.S. dollars, UK pounds, and euros to their PayPal accounts from Coinbase without paying a fee.
Paypal and Blockchain
Being a traditional e-payment system, PayPal has a rather controversial attitude towards the crypto industry. As for Q3 2018, the company had over 254 million active users worldwide, nevertheless, given the potential of cryptocurrencies and the opportunities that they open in front of customers in the sphere of instant payments, PayPal cannot but feel a rather serious competition.
But as it was claimed by the company’s co-founder Luke Nosek, the initial goal of PayPal was rather close to the idea staying behind the crypto. Initially, the company wanted to create an independent global currency that wouldn’t be affected by external factors, including the influence from the side of banks and governments.
Speaking about the achievements of the company, he said:
“We succeeded at building something that was economically very powerful, enabled by many small businesses, and we’re super proud of it, but we never achieved the mission.”
An interesting thing about this online payment system platform is that it tried to avoid implementation of Bitcoin till December 2018. In December, it launched a reward system for employees based on blockchain technology. This system is considered to be a motivating tool to encourage the staff to take part in innovation-related programs.
Moreover, earlier last year it was revealed that the platform also filed a patent application to ensure the higher speed of virtual currency transactions.