PayPal unveils Pay With Crypto for merchants to accept bitcoin, ether, USDT, and more via Coinbase, OKX, and other wallets, rolling out in the coming weeks
PayPal Holdings Inc. will soon allow businesses to accept more than one hundred cryptocurrencies at checkout.
Context & Ripple Effects
PayPal’s crypto effort has moved from enabling customers to spend holdings with its merchant network in 2021 to giving US business accounts the ability to buy, hold and sell crypto in 2024. The new checkout feature extends that merchant-side arc beyond PayPal-held balances.
The important change is wallet interoperability: PayPal had previously outlined support for transfers to outside crypto wallets, while Coinbase Commerce had already offered merchants direct crypto acceptance. PayPal is now positioning its checkout layer to connect to wallets including Coinbase and OKX.
First-order effects
- Merchants using PayPal will be able to offer checkout acceptance for bitcoin, ether, USDT and more than 100 cryptocurrencies as the feature rolls out.
- Customers paying from supported third-party wallets gain a PayPal-mediated route to complete merchant purchases, rather than being limited to crypto held within PayPal.
Second-order effects
- Coinbase, OKX and other wallet providers gain another merchant-checkout endpoint for their users, while PayPal broadens its relevance to crypto users without making its own wallet the sole entry point.
- Payment providers and merchant platforms offering crypto checkout will face stronger pressure to match both token breadth and external-wallet connectivity, rather than treating crypto as a closed-wallet feature.
Third-order effects
- If merchants adopt it, checkout may increasingly become an interoperability layer across wallets and tokens, with payment brands competing on integration reach and merchant simplicity rather than only on custody.
- The expansion also makes the operational and compliance treatment of multi-asset consumer payments more consequential for mainstream merchant payment networks; the scale of that effect will depend on actual merchant and shopper use.
The trend: This is one data point in crypto payments shifting from closed-platform purchasing toward multi-wallet, multi-token merchant checkout.