PayPal CTO: Crypto Still Has to Prove Itself to Get Wide Adoption

PayPal’s chief technical officer has stated that crypto developers have to be attentive to consumer’s needs if they want the industry adoption to move faster.

Sri Shivananda — an eBay veteran who has been in his role at PayPal since 2016 — gave his opinion on crypto adoption at the Economic Times (ET) Global Business Summit, according to ET report from March 9.

In his speech, Shivananda said that cryptocurrency has, in many cases, become more similar to “asset play” than to currency. He opined:

“The main thing to keep in mind in this business is to follow consumers. If consumers start to feel like there’s some leverage that they get through cryptocurrencies, everything else will automatically fall in line.”

Currency digitization is an issue of “if” not “when”

Shivananda echoed the viewpoint recently presented by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, saying that the digitization of currencies is inevitable — it is a matter of “if” not “when”. Its future will take shape to reflect engagement by consumers, merchants, fintech enterprises regulators and governments, he stated.

Alternatives to cryptocurrency, he maintained, already reached notable success. The National Payments Corp of India has been running a unified payment interface (UPI) for e-commerce transactions, which allows micropayments and person-to-person payments:

“What has been done with UPI is truly inspiring. And it’s a model that has not only been implemented, but it’s working […] every country and every company around the world should look at and take inspiration from it and see if some of that can be replicated across the globe.”

PayPal’s decision to leave Libra

Shivananda referred to his platform at the Summit to comment on PayPal’s decision to leave Libra Association in October 2019, around five months after joining the project.

While the company mentioned regulatory concerns at the time, Shivananda explained PayPal’s departure in a different way. Though the company had originally beileved that Libra was aimed at assisting the “under-served, the people that are not supported by the system today,” he said PayPal later “felt that was not going to be the case, in the short to medium term.”

The local context

Shivananda made his statement amid a highly eventful period for the cryptocurrency sector in India.

Last week, the industry celebraled a historic victory, when the country’s Supreme Court lifted the ban on banks servicing crypto-related companies imposed by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

However, the situation remains uncertain, as some suggest that RBI plans to appeal the ruling. Furthermore, the prospect of awkward crypto-specific regulation — even a potential ban on crypto — will be defined with a postponed legislative bill, the future of which is still unclear.