PayPal Is Already Boosting Bitcoin Trading Among Users: Survey

Of the 380 PayPal users surveyed by Mizuho Securities, almost a fifth had traded Bitcoin on the app.

In brief

• Mizuho Securities, an investment bank, asked 380 PayPal users about their trading habits
• 17% said they’d already traded Bitcoin on the app.
• PayPal began allowing US-based users to pay with Bitcoin this past month.

According to a new survey from Mizuho Securities, the investment branch of Mizuho Financial Group, nearly a fifth of PayPal users may already be taking advantage of the app’s new Bitcoin capabilities.

Of the 380 users surveyed, 17% said they’d already used PayPal to trade Bitcoin, and 65% said they would use Bitcoin to pay for goods and services.

That’s good news for the digital payments giant, which recently bet big on the mass adoption of cryptocurrencies. The company announced this past month that it would begin supporting payments in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin for users in the US.

And CEO Dan Schulman has been beating the drum for these cryptocurrencies as actual payment systems, telling CNBC that “when you start to move crypto as a potential funding instrument… that bolsters its utility, and stabilizes it as well.”

The catch is that cryptocurrencies purchased within the PayPal app can’t be transferred out to other wallets, and non-PayPal crypto can’t be transferred in. And when crypto is spent on PayPal, it’s automatically converted into fiat currency, which is what the merchant ends up receiving.

Mizuho also suggested that Bitcoin trading in PayPal’s user base could be a good thing for the stock price—the report has the company’s stock price target at $290, up from $270 (it’s at $218 today), and says that revenue could increase by ~20% next year.

PayPal stock is already up more than 100% since the start of the year. The price of Bitcoin is up nearly 164% year to date.