The Cryptocurrency Informer

(00:25) The big, and not very surprising, news of the week has to do with PayPal. The payment processing giant has finally unveiled its plan to let users buy, sell, and use crypto for purchases – and it’s going to be rolling out quite soon. According to Reuters, and plenty of other news sources, PayPal “will allow customers to hold bitcoin and other virtual coins in its online wallet and shop using cryptocurrencies at the 26 million merchants on its network.” The ability to buy and sell crypto, will apparently be rolling out within the next few weeks. As for using crypto as a payment, that will be happening early 2021. Following that, PayPal will expand these services to Venmo.  

This of course, is a huge deal for mainstream crypto adoption. PayPal reported 346 million active users in the 2^nd quarter of 2020 and Venmo reportedly has over 50 million users.

(01:15) Now, as with any development in crypto, there is indeed some negative feedback surrounding this announcement – and perhaps, the negativity is justified. As of now, it seems as though PayPal users will have little control over their crypto…so no transferring the crypto in or out of your PayPal wallet. Of course, in the world of crypto, this is a very dishonorable move. The classic crypto traditionalist saying is “not your keys, not your coins”, which refers to the private keys that give someone true ownership of their cryptocurrency. However, one could argue that perfection is the enemy of progress here – less tech savvy people are going to have access to cryptocurrency now more than ever, and private key encryption can be a tough concept to grasp for complete beginners.

Perhaps though the backlash against the inability to truly own the crypto you buy on PayPal will be loud enough to eventually change PayPal’s approach. Or, perhaps any crypto beginner who joins the world of crypto via the PayPal on-ramp will, over time, learn more about cryptocurrency, including the importance of owning your own crypto. Either way, it’s impossible to argue against the effect that this level of mainstream adoption will have on the cryptocurrency ecosystem, which has been thriving for quite some time.

(02:18) Next up, Binance Jersey. For our Americentric listeners, no…Binance Jersey is NOT a Binance that is only for residents of New Jersey. Binance Jersey was created to expand Binances presence in Europe, and “currently provides secure and reliable trading of Pounds Sterling (GBP) and Euros (EUR) with Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), in addition to asset management services to users.” However, this week Binance announced that Binance Jersey will soon be a short-lived memory. According to an announcement from Binance Jersey earlier this week, the UK tax haven-based exchange will be closing deposits on October 30th, closing trading services on November 9th, and then completely shutting down on November 30th. Binance claims this shutdown is occurring because the services offered through Binance Jersey are now available on Binance, but according to CoinTelegraph, “the exchange aimed to make Binance Jersey a “major driving force” in European markets, the statistics show that it fell short of its goals”.

(03:14) As one exchange closes, another re-opens. Kraken, a popular US-based exchange, has resumed trading in Japan after 2 years of being closed down. Japan is one of the largest markets for cryptocurrency trading, and Kraken had shut down their services back in 2018 due to the cost of maintaining business. On Thursday, Kraken announced they are resuming services for Japanese residents, including spot trading for BTC, ETH, XRP, BCH, and LTC.

(03:39) Finally, some potentially good news for Redditors. The cryptocurrency that is gained for posting quality content, or being a bot that spams not-so-quality content, on the subreddit /r/Cryptocurrency has been officially listed on the price aggregator websites Coinmarketcap and CoingGecko. For those unfamiliar, the coin symbol is Moons, and they are currently trading at around $.06 a moon as of recording, although they only have one market currently – Honeyswap. There are some guides on the subreddit that explain how to trade your moons right now, as they aren’t yet a crypto that are on all the major exchanges. Will they eventually be? Perhaps, but there would likely need to be some major overhauls to how moons are credited on Reddit to avoid the aforementioned bot spam to harvest those sweet moons.

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That’s it for this week’s episode of The Cryptocurrency Informer. Don’t forget – if you want to read more about each of these stories, go to talk.bitcoin.tax and click on The Cryptocurrency Informer link. Every episode is accompanied by a number of relevant links for each story, so you can do your own in-depth research on the topics that interest you.

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