PayPal’s Venmo Can Now Be Used to Buy Bitcoin and Ethereum via MoonPay

PayPal is diving deeper into the crypto world.

In a Thursday announcement, the payments giant said that U.S. customers could now buy digital coins and tokens like Bitcoin and Ethereum on MoonPay using their Venmo accounts.

Venmo is a popular mobile payments app owned by PayPal. MoonPay is a platform allowing people to buy, sell, or swap digital coins and tokens. Venmo customers can use their account balance, a direct bank withdrawal, or debit card to fund crypto purchases on MoonPay, however MoonPay said that users in New York and Texas cannot use the Venmo integration.

The announcement is part of PayPal’s latest strategy to make crypto available to everyday people. In September, the payments company enabled U.S. merchants to buy, hold, and sell cryptocurrency from their business accounts.

Last year, it launched an Ethereum-based, dollar-pegged stablecoin called PayPal USD (PYUSD). The asset now also runs on Solana, the crypto network behind the fifth-biggest digital coin by market cap, SOL. In April, PayPal announced that users could swap PYUSD for dollars to make international payments via payments platform Xoom.

Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies that are designed to have a less volatile nature than Bitcoin and other digital coins. They tend to be backed by dollars or treasuries, and are used by traders to make transactions on exchanges quickly, or by those who want to send money across borders.

Edited by Andrew Hayward