eBay Might Soon Accept Digital Currency Payments

For years, the cryptocurrency community has talked about the main factors that could fuel worldwide adoptability rates. These factors mostly include regulatory certainty, price stability, consumer education and merchant support. Recent reports indicate that eBay might soon take an important step, and therefore accept bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as payment methods.

The speculation is based on several photos of eBay Consensus 2019 advertisements that surfaced online. As part of the ads, eBay wrote: “Virtual Currency. It’s happening on eBay”, and “Reach 179 million active buyers in the world’s largest marketplace”.

It is important to keep in mind that the worldwide marketplace has often expressed its interest in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. Yet, so far, the company has never confirmed plans of integrating bitcoin or any other coin. Some Twitter users believe that eBay may launch its very own token, whereas others think that this is clear proof that bitcoin integration is coming along. No official confirmation from eBay has arrived yet, since the Consensus 2019 event taking place in New York has not started yet.

An interesting aspect worth considering is that last year, UTRUST, a crypto payment service, hired Sanja Kon, who is a former executive that worked at both PayPal and eBay. Her involvement in the project is unknown, yet it would definitely make sense. UTRUST has gained quite a bit of popularity on the market, granted that it markets itself as a crypto-based payment solution that provides instant transactions, crypto-to-cash fund settlement and buyer protection. Additionally, the company also supports multiple digital currencies, which it also converts to fiat. These are all features that an eBay crypto payment solution might need to offer.

In the past, eBay’s Senior Vice President has talked about eBay’s serious plans of considering bitcoin-based payments, yet he announced that it would likely take a while before this feature is implemented.

Despite these aspects, some members of the cryptocurrency community believe that the ads simply refer to purchasing and selling virtual currency on the eBay marketplace, which is a feature that has been offered for a while. Regardless, we can expect eBay to issue some comments on the matter soon.