Coinbase Integrates PayPal to Broaden its Reach
By Jamie Redman -
June 22, 2016

Popular bitcoin exchange and wallet service Coinbase, otherwise known as GDAX, has recently secured a registrant base of 4 million users worldwide. Now the firm has added Paypal support for bitcoin sells and credit card purchasing options.

San Francisco-based Coinbase is continuing its growth, seeing a significant rise in registration this month alone. Founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, the Bitcoin-based firm has made considerable progress since its inception.

Now, with PayPal integration, the company is opening more options for sellers within the Bitcoin landscape.

Coinbase writes via its blog post announcement:

“One of our objectives at Coinbase is to add as many funding mechanisms as possible to make exchanging digital currency easy. As a step in that direction, Coinbase now accepts PayPal (for Bitcoin sells) and credit cards (for bitcoin buys). Thousands of Coinbase users use PayPal for their fiat currency transactions around the world. Through this integration, Coinbase users are now able to sell BTC and have their USD funds deposited to a PayPal wallet. To start, we’re offering PayPal cash-out for US users only. In the future, we hope to add support for other countries, and to support buys through PayPal as well.”
PayPal has been seemingly moving into the Bitcoin world slowly by taking baby steps. Back in December 2015, the multinational payment processor filed a patent for cryptocurrency integration within their applications.The new Coinbase-PayPal collaboration service is currently in beta, and the exchange will be inviting more users over the next few weeks alongside international expansion.

To test the new Coinbase feature, users can visit the payment methods page on the Coinbase website or tap “Settings” and then “Payment Methods” on iOS or Android. Coinbase has grown into a very large company over the years. In 2013, the company sold a record $1 million bitcoins per month, and now the service stores roughly 10 percent of all BTC in existence, according to Brian Armstrong. Coinbase hopes to hear from its user base with feedback about the new integration with PayPal and says to contactthem via the company’s Community Forum. The company wants the community to know that it is still committed to Bitcoin, even though it recently had shown support for the Ethereum protocol. Fred Ehrsam writes in a recent Medium blog post that he believes the “scripting language in Bitcoin — the piece of every Bitcoin transaction that lets you run a little software program along with it — is too restrictive.” However, the public has realized that maybe “dumb contracts” are the way to go since the DAO debacle. Still, Coinbase plans to support Ethereum within its GDAX exchange and cover a variety of digital assets in general. Ehrsam says he has “not given up on Bitcoin, and it’s hard to argue with a network that has been so resilient.” The company states via their website, “Bitcoin is changing how we use and think about money,” and the firm believes they are one of the “most trusted compan[ies] in the space.”