PayPal Holdings Inc. PYPL shares,
rose 1.2% in pre-market trading on Thursday after BTIG analyst Mark Palmer updated the shares to buy from neutral, citing the traction for the company’s cryptocurrency platform. PayPal announced in October that it would start allowing users to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrencies like bitcoin BTCUSD,
through the PayPal platform, and Palmer said that Paxos, a private company that drives PayPal’s cryptographic efforts, “has seen its business volumes increase dramatically in recent weeks.” He expects “the vast majority” of the volume in Paxos’s itBit crypto exchange to reflect negotiations for PayPal customers, leading to his projection that encryption could add more than $ 1 billion to PayPal’s annual revenues in 2022. “Much more importantly, the traction seen at itBit and the growing volumes of cryptography bodes well for the growth and involvement of the active PYPL account, “he wrote. PayPal will also allow customers to make online purchases using their cryptocurrency reserves, which Palmer said would represent a lower cost financing mechanism for PayPal compared to when people use their service to finance online purchases with their credit cards. credit. “The result is that lower-cost financing associated with the use of cryptography in commercial financing transactions can provide a boost to your acquisition rate and margins,” he wrote, setting a $ 300 price target for inventory . PayPal shares have risen 110% in the past 12 months with the S&P 500 SPX,
gained 16%.
