The finance behemoth PayPal (PYPL) and cryptocurrency purchasing app MoonPay announced their partnership on Thursday.According to a press statement, the agreement enables MoonPay users in the United States to easily purchase cryptocurrency with PayPal through wallet transfers, bank transfers, and debit card transactions.Purchasing and dealing in cryptocurrency is a continuous endeavor that has not been enabled by the world’s high street banks. With over 15 million users, cryptocurrency-focused MoonPay is no slouch compared to PayPal’s around 426 million active accounts worldwide.
Ivan Soto-Wright, co-founder and CEO of MoonPay, described the partnership as “symbiotic,” noting that although PayPal’s limited selection of major cryptocurrencies is now expanded to include the entire spectrum of well-known tokens, users of his app expand their reach and have a new flexible payment option. As Soto-Wright noted, the agreement involves PayPal becoming integrated into MoonPay’s infrastructure rather than a standalone integration of the kind the finance behemoth has been investigating with Web3 wallet MetaMask, for example.
We are the first company to do this with PayPal, and it was a long process to get them comfortable,” Soto-Wright said in an interview. “We process billions of dollars on debit and credit cards in terms of cryptocurrency, and we think this is going to be a big step up for us in terms of helping us reach more customers, people that may have had their card declined from one of their banks. Nobody’s fault; it’s just the banks; banks sometimes reject crypto companies.”