PayPal recently announced they were exploring allowing their users to send their cryptocurrencies off the exchange. This would be a good bonus when they allow it.
Currently, PayPal allows users to buy, sell or hold Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash. A year ago, PayPal allowed users to buy cryptocurrencies for the first time. This gave a more recognizable company access to this market that already had millions of users. PayPal has 300 million users.
With cryptocurrencies, if you bought them on PayPal, you don’t technically own them. The cryptocurrencies are held on PayPal’s exchange.
This sounds fine but there have been past instances where companies were hacked, and people lost their cryptocurrencies. Since cryptocurrencies are not regulated, many people lost their cryptocurrencies. In a few instances, companies had the reserves to cover the losses. But this is not always the case.
Even with more prominent cryptocurrency exchanges, they have been hacked as recently as this year. Cryptocurrency exchange HotBit was hacked this past April.
For many people, it is strange to take your money from your bank since you consider it safe. Banks are federally regulated up to $250,000 per person so if the bank was robbed, your money would be safe since the Federal government backs the money.
With cryptocurrencies, it’s a different matter. These are the cryptocurrencies that you own but the Federal government does not back your exchange if they are hacked.
Once you have purchased the cryptocurrencies on PayPal, you want to take them off the exchange. Of course, this will happen when PayPal allows this which should be in the future. You can still keep the cryptocurrencies on the exchange but you risk PayPal getting hacked. Robinhood is another company where you don’t own your cryptocurrencies either.
PayPal says they will cover you but the information is vague. The process may not be as simple as recovering losses in normal PayPal transactions and recovering your cryptocurrencies could be a drawn-out process.
You have several options to move your cryptocurrencies off of PayPal.
- 000
- access
- Allowing
- announced
- April
- Bank
- Banks
- Bitcoin
- Bitcoin Cash
- buy
- Cash
- Coindesk
- Companies
- company
- cryptocurrencies
- cryptocurrency
- Cryptocurrency Exchange
- Cryptocurrency Exchanges
- CZ
- ethereum
- EU
- EV
- exchange
- Exchanges
- Federal
- Federal government
- fine
- First
- first time
- future
- good
- Government
- hold
- hr
- HTTPS
- ia
- IP
- IT
- Litecoin
- Market
- medium
- million
- money
- move
- Options
- PayPal
- People
- protect
- Risk
- Robinhood
- safe
- sell
- Simple
- So
- time
- Transactions
- users
- year