PayPal announced it would start accepting payments in Bitcoin via its subsidiary, Braintree. The company is cooperating with Bitcoin payment platform Coinbase, one of the largest Bitcoin companies, which already handles payments for such clients as Overstock and Reddit.



The integration of the cryptocurrency means that the companies that already use Braintree for their payments will now be able to accept Bitcoin without making any changes to their configuration. Bitcoin experts are sure that this move could boost adoption of the cryptocurrency.

Braintree already handles transactions by such companies as AirBnB, Uber and Dropbox. Coinbase explained that many developers want to add Bitcoin, but Braintree would handle all of their payments and they didn’t want to add another SDK, saying that they can accept it only if Braintree added it. Although the services that are willing to accept Bitcoin payments will still need to set up a Coinbase wallet, they also can instantly convert every Bitcoin payment back into fiat currency.

It should be noted that Braintree’s decision to support Bitcoin came after the announcement of Bitcoin adoption by its competitor, Stripe, a few months ago. Stripe’s Bitcoin facility is currently operating in beta mode, with the company handling the payments itself, without partnering with a third-party. Indeed, Bitcoin fits in nicely with Stripe’s product plan. The company itself admitted that credit cards were a good first thing to roll out due to their widespread penetration, but in fact Stripe doesn’t bill itself as a credit card processing company, but rather a payments company.

Talking about PayPal, the service is keeping Bitcoin at an arm’s length. The company emphasized that the integration with Braintree will not affect customers or merchants with PayPal accounts. Although Braintree has little public profile from the consumer side, this move opens the door for the service to integrate Bitcoin into its main wallet functionality