PayPal Appoints Wences Casares to its Board of Directors

[BitcoinXio]

PayPal Appoints Wences Casares to its Board of Directors

PayPal announced it has appointed Wences Casares (CEO of XAPO) to its Board of Directors. A successful international fintech entrepreneur and recognized next-generation payment and crypto-currency thought leader, Casares will serve on PayPal’s Compensation Committee. His appointment was effective January 12, 2016.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/2 ... -Directors

[craigonesun]

WOW, this is an amazing step forward for bitcoin

[rogerver]

Who wants to be the first to speculate on what this will mean for Bitcoin?

[arnoudk]

Who wants to be the first to speculate on what this will mean for Bitcoin?

I would speculate that PayPal and XAPO have been in (in)formal discussions regarding the future of payments on the Internet. It would indicate that they value the services that XAPO offers, but that they are not willing or ready to associate themselves with bitcoin too closely just yet. But, I think, they do want to be 'closer' to the latest developments. I think PayPal has a lot to offer XAPO in terms of access to an incredible scale of customers. XAPO can offer PayPal knowledge, expertise and real-world experience with bitcoin. I would not be surprised if - given enough time - some kind of integration would become visible. Who knows, maybe PayPal will just buy XAPO

I however don't think this will do much, if anything, for the bitcoin price immediately. It strengthens the bitcoin foundation, but these kinds of stories have less and less impact on price. (Sure, if PayPal were to start accepting bitcoin - that would be big enough for some price movement, but adding a crypto enterpreneur to their board of directors would not have significant impact I think).

If bitcoin continues to grow, prove its value to regular people, enable ways of working that were impossible or impractical before, empower people directly - and all that good stuff - then it will grow in user base, and importance. All it really needs to do is "not screw up", and let the central banks around the world destroy the currencies that they pretend to be superior. Bitcoin will emerge from that as a clear winner.

[BitcoinXio]

Who wants to be the first to speculate on what this will mean for Bitcoin?

I would speculate that PayPal and XAPO have been in (in)formal discussions regarding the future of payments on the Internet. It would indicate that they value the services that XAPO offers, but that they are not willing or ready to associate themselves with bitcoin too closely just yet. But, I think, they do want to be 'closer' to the latest developments. I think PayPal has a lot to offer XAPO in terms of access to an incredible scale of customers. XAPO can offer PayPal knowledge, expertise and real-world experience with bitcoin. I would not be surprised if - given enough time - some kind of integration would become visible. Who knows, maybe PayPal will just buy XAPO

I however don't think this will do much, if anything, for the bitcoin price immediately. It strengthens the bitcoin foundation, but these kinds of stories have less and less impact on price. (Sure, if PayPal were to start accepting bitcoin - that would be big enough for some price movement, but adding a crypto enterpreneur to their board of directors would not have significant impact I think).

If bitcoin continues to grow, prove its value to regular people, enable ways of working that were impossible or impractical before, empower people directly - and all that good stuff - then it will grow in user base, and importance. All it really needs to do is "not screw up", and let the central banks around the world destroy the currencies that they pretend to be superior. Bitcoin will emerge from that as a clear winner.

I think this is a very logical assumption. Things like this don't happen overnight. PayPal and Wences have been in talks for some time now before this happened. The goal of those talks more than likely is to advance PayPal to the next level (obviously!), and how they can achieve that. Wences being the entrepreneur he is in the financial sector clearly caught their eye, and at some point they began discussions (maybe let's theorize mid-2015).

I could certainly see that PayPal will be using Wences as a person to evaluate the risk of using bitcoin with PayPal. PayPal knows that bitcoin is a market emerging technology and they don't want to fall behind, so they brought on someone with the talent, success, and experience in the field of bitcoin to give them the proper risk analysis on bringing bitcoin and other emerging financial technologies to PayPal to make them a success.

My bullish prediction is that later this year PayPal will make an announcement that they will officially integrate bitcoin into their systems, which maybe could happen by 2017.