Dan Schulman, the CEO of PayPal, was speaking at the Economic Club of New York and he said the cryptocurrencies have a very uncertain future, even though he assured that the blockchain technology has a lot of potential.
Schulman was speaking together with David Solomon, the president and co-chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs. The CEO of PayPal said the cryptocurrencies were an experiment and the direction they would take was not clear, adding that the application of regulations was important.
Just like many other important figures from the traditional financial systems, Dan Schulman does not think well of the cryptocurrencies, but praises the blockchain technology and its potentials, even though this innovative technology is in close relation to the digital currencies.
According to him, the real power of the blockchain are not the cryptocurrencies, but the confidence and its applications. It could replace the PCP/IP protocol. He also said: “The utopian point of view for blockchain users is for blockchain to be the new protocol, allowing for distributed trust. Individual own their info, not a centralized authority.”
Nevertheless, Schulman acts as if he does not realize the cryptocurrencies are one of the applications of the blockchain technology and that the tokens and cryptoassets are a fundamental part of this structure.
This first objective of Bitcoin and its underlying technology is to decentralize the trust, just like Schulman affirms and eliminate the necessity for intermediation by centralized financial authorities.
On the other hand, a representative of PayPal commented the company was interest in any technology, process or application that has the potential to make our vision of financial inclusion possible.
A few days ago, PayPal filed a patent for a protocol that is trying to solve the scalability problem of the cryptocurrencies. This protocol is supposed to accelerate the confirmation time of the transactions and increase the adoption of the cryptocurrencies as methods of payment.
Jason Deleeuw, an analyst working for Piper Jaffray investment banks said the following about the patent: “The timing of the patent application vs. more recent public commentary by PayPal suggests that any near-term solutions by PayPal to make crypto merchant payments scalable may have been de-prioritized. Still, PayPal has said crypto assets have long-term merit and could eventually see ubiquity and acceptance as an everyday form of payment.”
Peter Thiel, one of the founder of PayPal has showed great enthusiasm for the blockchain ecosystem, while the platform he co-founded has showed little support to the clients that would like to use PayPal to acquire digital assets.
Thiel is scheduled to talk at the Economic Club of New York on March 15th and it is probable he will talk about PayPal and its relationship with the cryptocurrencies.
