PayPal CEO Gives Nod of Approval to Crypto, Expects Blockchain to Redefine Finance

Dan Schulman, CEO of payments giant PayPal, thinks crypto will redefine the global financial system.

The tech veteran sat down in an interview with Israeli technology publication CTech to reveal his thoughts on the burgeoning digital asset space.

“I'm very excited about what crypto and digital ledger technology can do to the financial system going forward,” Schulman told CTech ahead of his keynote speech at Axis Tel Aviv.

“I think the initial things that everyone thinks about Crypto, buying and selling it, and what the price of Bitcoin is going to be tomorrow, that's the least interesting part about digital currencies to me. That is thinking about digital currencies as an asset class. To me, the real exciting thing about digital currencies is what kind of utility can they provide in payments.”

From Schulman’s point of view, central banks are “clearly” looking at issuing digital currencies, which may play a part in the evolution of crypto assets.

“The intersection between CBDC, stable coins, digital wallets, and enhanced utility of payments through cryptocurrencies is not just fascinating but I think will redefine a lot of the financial world going forward.”

The PayPal boss’s shoutout to crypto isn’t out of the blue. A long time crypto believer, he revealed in 2019 he was invested in Bitcoin during an interview with Fortune. Early last year when PayPal rolled out crypto services on its platform, Schulman told Time that demand for the new feature shattered the company’s original expectations.

“Demand on the crypto side has been multiple-fold to what we initially expected. There’s a lot of excitement," he said. “We’ve been looking at digital forms of currency and DLT (distributed ledger technology) for six years or so. But I thought it was early and I thought cryptocurrencies at the time were much more assets than they were currency.”

Schulman predicted that over the next decade, crypto would bring more change to the financial system than the previous two, driven by a necessity to fix an inefficient financial system in need of modernization.