PayPal to Enable On-Chain Transfers From Venmo Accounts, Including to On-Chain Wallets

AUSTIN, Texas — Payments company PayPal (PYPL) will allow on-chain transfers from Venmo accounts starting in May, Jose Fernandez da Ponte, the company's senior vice president and general manager of blockchain, crypto and digital currencies, said during a panel at Consensus 2023.

"You can buy a gift on Venmo and send it out. You can invite people and send it to another Venmo user, you can send it to a PayPal user. You can send it to an external wallet, you can send it to the hardware wallet, which we think is something fundamentally important," da Ponte said. "Consumers have been asking for that for a while."

The announcement comes a year after the payments company said third-party wallet transfers would be coming to the PayPal and Venmo platforms, with PayPal itself now already offering this feature.

Da Ponte also said that the company is interested in being involved in payments for Web3, including gaming and media loyalty and offering micropayments and streaming payments, for example.

“The gaming industry is one that we think is very ripe for the adoption of cryptocurrencies,” da Ponte said.

PayPal, he added, is “comfortable in the ethereum universe,” and will support other protocols in the future.

Read full coverage of Consensus 2023 here.