PayPal Held $604M of Customers' Crypto as of Year-End 2022
The payments company held $291 million of bitcoin and $250 million of ether, with the rest comprising litecoin and bitcoin cash.
Feb 10, 2023 at 12:57 p.m. UTC:format(webp)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/coindesk/5XSOHTWJ65E4BGFAFLIXCQ6ZXM.jpg)
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PayPal (PYPL) held a total of $604 million of bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), litecoin (LTC) and bitcoin cash (BCH) for its customers as of Dec. 31, according to its annual report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Almost 90% of the amount was divided between the two largest cryptocurrencies by market value: $291 million in BTC and $250 million in ETH. The remaining $63 million is made up of LTC and BCH. PayPal did not provide a breakdown of the two.
The figure compares with $690 million held as of the end of September, and corresponds to a period that saw sharp declines in crypto valuations following the collapse of exchange FTX.
The payments company has been allowing customers to buy and sell crypto since October 2020, though has only recently begun to disclose specific holdings of different coins in its SEC filings. This granularity is now required by the SEC as per Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 121 (SAB 121), introduced in March last year.
Despite offering crypto trading since 2020, PayPal did not allow its users to withdraw coins off the platform to external wallets until June last year.
UPDATE (Feb. 10, 15:56 UTC): Adds last paragraph on when PayPal allowed crypto withdrawals.
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Jamie Crawley is a CoinDesk news reporter based in London.
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