Crypto News RoundUp: Visa and PayPal Reveal More Crypto Ambitions, Prices Looking Bullish

April 1, 2021

Welcome to the weekly news roundup here at Netcoins.

This week has been huge not only for the price appreciation of cryptocurrencies, but for the continued blurring of the lines between traditional finance, payment gateways, and cryptocurrency.

Visa and PayPal are revealing bigger plans to get directly involved in cryptocurrency. More billionaires are investing too, and the immediate short-term future looks bullish for the industry as a whole.

Without any further ado, here are the news.

 

Visa Is Now Settling Payments in Crypto without Changing Back to Fiat

The ongoing race by payment providers to cash in on crypto by doing what they do best is heating up.

Visa announced this week they are working with Crypto.com to settle transactions using the U.S. Dollar stablecoin, which lives on the Ethereum blockchain. The two companies have been working together for a while now, but until this week’s announcement, Visa required Crypto.com to follow its standard operating procedures by exchanging crypto to fiat to settle payments.

The fact that Crypto.com is now going to settle transactions using USDC is big news. It means that both Crypto.com and Visa are likely to work together in the future as the onboarding of central bank digital currencies becomes more of a necessity.

This will all further blur the lines between government-backed blockchains and truly public blockchains and ultimately accelerate adoption.

MasterCard announced its intention to get involved with the crypto game back in February.

 

PayPal Enabling Crypto Transactions for 29 Million Merchants

PayPal CEO, Dan Schulman, posted a video of himself buying what he calls ‘crypto boots’ on YouTube this week. Schulman posted the video in order to celebrate the fact that PayPal is officially allowing 29 million merchants across America to accept crypto transactions.

The move will be rolled out over the coming months and represents yet another deep dive on the part of traditional payment providers who want to adopt cryptocurrency and ultimately capitalize off of the price increases and future stability of cryptocurrencies as stores of value.

Schulman goes on to say that he thinks moves like the one his company is making right now are going to allow cryptocurrency to make a broader mainstream transition from simply something that people use to store value to something that people actually use to transact with every day.

It appears at least one key decision-maker in the payment provider space is ready to accept change. It’s only a matter of time before his competitors do too.

 

Bitcoin Price Closing in on $75,000 CAD

Bitcoin is currently sitting at $74,100 at the time of this writing. That’s another 12% increase over the last week. It appears all of the above news coming out about adoption and a lot of the news coming out in last week’s Weekly Round Up are clearly having a positive impact on the price.

The hype train is back in motion as one prominent cryptocurrency executive is suggesting that a single Bitcoin will be enough to buy a Lamborghini by the end of the year.

With hype comes a downside as well though. Former U.S. Congressman Ron Paul says that neither gold, nor real estate, nor Bitcoin truly have the ability to escape a government crackdown. He believes that a crackdown will come in the form of increased taxes, pointing out that trillions of dollars in federal deficits will need to be paid for one way or another.

Still, any investor looking to park their money somewhere to try to earn interest is laughing all the way to Netcoins with the returns they are seeing on cryptocurrency right now.

 

Total Market Capitalization of Cryptos Reaches $2.38 Trillion Canadian

Bitcoin’s price is up more than 500% over the last six months. The strong bullish move is thanks to Wall Street investors starting to pour money into the infrastructure surrounding various projects within the cryptocurrency economy. George Soros is a billionaire hedge fund manager doing just that. He says that cryptocurrencies have reached an inflection point and that investing in the infrastructure on a large scale is a great opportunity.

Sentiment like that proves exactly why you should be joining the big boys in making your first investment in cryptocurrency. When you’re ready to take the plunge, remember two things. One, invest only what you can afford to lose.

Two, register for a free account with Netcoins to get started. It’s one of the most trusted cryptocurrency exchanges in Canada and it’s a great on-ramp for crypto investors new and old.

You’re now officially up-to-date on this week’s happenings!

If you want to learn more about all things crypto, read more here. 

Buying bitcoin is easy with Netcoins. Create an account, fund it with an e-Transfer (other funding options available), and head to the trade page to buy or sell bitcoin. Netcoins is a fully regulated, publicly owned crypto trading platform.