The payment giant PayPal has made its first investment in a blockchain company. They have invested in Cambridge Blockchain. A company that helps financial institutions and other companies manage confidential data, such as personal identification in shared ledgers.
The PayPal financing was part of an extension of the Series A financing. The Series A financing round has contributed a total of $ 10.5 million for the startup. The financing came from several different investors from other large companies such as HCM Capital, the VC arm of Foxconn, Digital Currency Group.
PayPal Adding cryptographic payments?
A PayPal spokesperson said, they made an investment in Cambridge Blockchain because it is applying blockchain for digital identity in a way that they believe could benefit financial services companies, including PayPal. Their investment will allow them to explore possible collaborations to take advantage of blockchain technology.
For some time, rumors have been spreading in the cryptography community that PayPal would be entering the crypto payments industry. Clearly, this is a first step towards water and its intention is to investigate other companies that use blockchain technology.
PayPal support from Cambridge Blockchain
In 2018, Cambridge was part of a small cohort of startup companies in the accelerator program Fintech Europe 2018, which was sponsored by PayPal. CEO Matthew Commons said PayPal has been involved for more than a year.
Commons added they can not talk specifically about anything commercially that they are doing because it is a kind of exploration. But he thinks that the fact that they are in Luxembourg and that PayPal has an important presence there also helped to put things in March.
Case of future use of technology
The company has vast experience with the strict European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and PSD2. One of the main objectives of the company is to reduce the myriad of duplication around the KYC in the cryptographic space. Which allows people to go through the process only once to access many different financial services.
Obviously, this will be a great benefit for PayPal, which has hundreds of millions of users. This will allow many people to quickly access many different crypto services and perhaps Bitcoin payments through PayPal.