Jamie Iannone, the CEO of popular marketplace eBay, announced that from March 10 onwards the platform will start accepting crypto payments.
eBay Search for alternative payment methods
“We are just completing our transition to manage payments, where we now manage $85 billion in volume directly on our platform,” Iannone told TheStreet. “This gives us the opportunity to open new forms of payment.”
He says in the interview that eBay should become the platform for Gen Z and millennials. “We have opened up Google Pay and Apple Pay. We have a partnership with Afterpay in Australia which is a platform that appeals to Gen Z which is a buy now pay later platform in the marketplace. Because of this, we continue to evaluate other forms of payments that we should take on the platform. We currently do not accept any cryptocurrency on the platform,” said Iannone.
When it comes to eBay’s stance on innovative technology like blockchain and cryptocurrencies, Iannone noted the growing popularity of non-replaceable tokens on its platform without making an official statement about it.
Growing popularity of crypto
The platform is reportedly already generating approximately $85 billion in volume, after which it has been looking for new payment methods. The growing popularity of the entire crypto and NFT market would be one of the reasons for adding crypto as a payment option.
Several other parties have already preceded eBay with some form of crypto acceptance. However, it is not the first time eBay has got involved with the crypto world. In 2014, the platform already tried to support Bitcoin as a payment option. At the time, however, there was still too little demand for it. Now that seems to have completely changed. Crypto seems to be becoming much more mainstream and more acceptable to the masses with this. It is not yet known when the integration will be completed.
eBay is not new to crypto
What many people may not know, is that eBay already has a marketplace for NFTs, making the option to pay in crypto a logical next step. At the time of writing, there are over 1,000 art NFTs for sale on the platform.
It immediately became clear that NFTs are a suitable asset to sell on a platform such as eBay. Users put NFTs live on the platform, without the company disclosing anything. “So even without announcing or doing anything, people started trading Non-Fungible Tokens on our platform,” Iannone said.
With the advent of crypto, eBay could become a market leader over other online marketplaces. Everyone is already familiar with the platform, and crypto adoption on could help it become the biggest crypto and NFT marketplace all at once. At the moment, there are few large online marketplaces where you can shop with crypto.
“It reminded me of many years ago when people just started selling cars, when we didn’t even have a vehicle business at that time. So we see the same kind of thing with NFTs. eBay will be the place where people trade goods, be it physical or digital.”