eBay Signs Accord with Adyen and Cryptocurrency Payment Platform BitPay

The multinational global e-commerce corporation is “seriously considering” cryptocurrencies as a payment method, but Senior Vice President of eBay Americas Scott Cutler believes it’s not ready for such a big move.

eBay Drops Paypal for Adyen

According to Cutler, the e-commerce portal could take on cryptocurrencies as payments. In an interview with Yahoo Finance, the vice president accedes the present hype and popularity of cryptocurrencies. The executive signaled that eBay is looking into digital currencies but isn’t primed to accept them yet. Cutler stated:

“This is a trend that everybody is talking about, but sadly, at eBay, we don’t currently accept bitcoin as a form of payment. [We’re] seriously considering it as these cryptocurrencies become more mainstream, [but] we’re not quite there yet.”

eBay publicized its plan to discontinue PayPal as a payment option from its website, reflecting poorly on PayPal’s stock (PYPL). On January 31, 2018, Cutler’s firm announced that it has instead signed an accord with Adyen, an Amsterdam-based payment service company, to become eBay’s primary processor. More importantly, Adyen also partnered with BitPay, the popular cryptocurrency payment platform, which will allow all Ayden clients to use their service. About the agreement, BitPay’s blog stated, “Adyen’s merchants can now easily accept bitcoin as a payment method from their e-commerce stores.”

There is a considerable possibility that eBay could accept cryptocurrencies due to its partnership with Adyen.

Cryptocurrencies Versus Present Digital Payment Methods

Cryptocurrencies are more gaining global attention with an accumulated market cap of $433 billion at press time. Initially, bitcoin was said to replace fiat and become a currency much like any other. However, due to scalability and network congestion issues, most crypto enthusiasts regard it more as a store of value.

Steam, a digital distribution platform for games, dropped the cryptocurrency from its payment options for these very reasons in fact. It will be interesting to see which cryptocurrency eBay will choose for its platform, with several options like Dash, Litecoin, and Stellar.

Despite these scaling difficulties, the growth of digital currencies put many present-day payment networks such as PayPal. Interestingly, Max Levchin, Paypal co-founder, finds cryptocurrencies underpinning blockchain technology fantastic. In the past, he said:

“It’s a brilliant mathematical idea, fantastic technology, an interesting commodity to speculate on.”

One company that highly benefited by linking to bitcoin is Overstock, the American Internet Retailer, whose stocks surged by more than 320 percent over the past 12 months. The company’s stock (OSTK) trades at $58.60, while they were valued $17.85 on February 10, 2017. Overstock started accepting bitcoin in 2014 and now accepts various altcoins too.

Nevertheless, eBay’s decision to drop PayPal as a payment option will not be right away as the two companies are bound by the agreement which ends in the year 2020.

Will eBay introduce crypto payments earlier than 2020?