Coronavirus Pandemic Was Good for Crypto, and Here’s Why
3 min readAre you ready for crypto mass adoption? It’s here, and we have the COVID-19 pandemic to thank for that. Executives at keystone firms, such as PayPal and BlackRock, have intonated that digital assets could play a large role in the global financial system moving forward. For instance, in recent months, we’ve been watching with astonishment billionaires pouring into bitcoin (BTC).
Dan Schulman, CEO and president of PayPal, said “the time is now” for crypto. Schulman predicts digital currencies will soon be in the mainstream and even become a leading daily payments technology. He says the coronavirus pandemic “has pulled these trends forward anywhere between three to five years [and] five to six months.”
Big players enter the crypto space
PayPal, as you likely know by now, recently started to allow users to buy and sell bitcoin. Schulman points out there are already 360 million digital wallets. Mizuho Securities surveyed PayPal users, finding that 65% would use bitcoin as a currency at PayPal’s 28 million merchants.
Alongside bitcoin’s new major players like Square, MicroStrategy, and others, New York Digital Investments Group (NYDIG) raised $150 million for two new crypto investment funds for investors who want to go long bitcoin.
Additionally, Visa plans to support the issuance of USDC stablecoin credit cards. 60 million merchants could start integrating USDC software into their platforms to send and receive USDC payments.
Increasing mainstream adoption
Mass adoption is, of course, the ultimate goal of any cryptocurrency and blockchain project. We see that already, with the adoption of crypto debit cards. But cryptocurrency still leaves much to be desired when it comes to user friendliness.
For instance, we transfer crypto funds today with our public key. That is, someone else must type in your private key, which is a long stream of letters and numbers. That can be a lot of information to process for beginners. Streamlining that process, while ensuring it is safe and secure, will be a key avenue for faster crypto adoption.
Surprisingly few people hold cryptocurrency, compared to traditional financial instruments, despite so many people knowing about bitcoin. We think that the reason is because of a lack of convenience.
Ensuring convenience
In order to ensure convenience, we will need to develop centralized tools to manage crypto. In order for decentralized technology to be adopted, it must be convenient.
If someone built a decentralized internet, it would need to be convenient. At this point, I’d say that one of the biggest reasons why most people aren’t into cryptocurrency or haven’t gone into it, is because it is quite complicated to get into without having done quite a lot of research.
However, as bad as the pandemic has been, it has done a lot of good for cryptocurrency. People have had more time to research it, and, with the stimulus checks that were sent out, people even invested into it.
When users look at new investment opportunities, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will remain at the forefront. As I said, as bad as it sounds, the pandemic has actually spurred crypto mass adoption.
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