After rising to a market cap of nearly $4o billion, ethereum may now be moving into the payments market as Pastebin, a service used by some 2 million handling nearly 100 million pastes, announced today they accept eth for their pro account upgrade payments.

In a very short statement, Pastebin stated “we will upgrade your Pastebin account to a LIFETIME PRO account if you transfer $30 USD worth of ETH, or more.”

They say the payment will be manually handled, perhaps because no merchant tool for accepting eth has yet risen to trustworthy prominence, or maybe because they want to keep the eth.

Christian Haschek, an ethereum developer, recently wrote a step by step coding guide on how you can accept ethereum payments without an external service provider.

It does not seem that complicated, but as initial volumes may be low perhaps manual handling is not a bad idea at this stage until Coinbase finally decides to offer eth payments to their merchants.

The demand is clearly there, from both service providers who may want to earn eth rather than buy it, and from ethereum holders who may want to spend it directly rather than having to convert it to dollars.

That may mean this is just the beginning of what might be the second round towards a peer to peer cash network that operates as an alternative to more traditional payment networks, such as Visa or Western Union.

Some in the ethereum community say that’s not its purpose. The currency is very volatile, the infrastructure has to upgrade so that your grandma doesn’t have to deal with keys, and so on.

But as its market cap now rises to nearly $40 billion, while its fees remain as good as non existent despite handling nearly the same level as bitcoin’s transaction volumes, many merchants may want to tap into the eth market.

So, perhaps, the scope of ethereum has just widened once more, from music, to energy, industry, finance, and now to maybe just simple global permissionless as good as free and as good as instant payments.