Shares of PayPal Holdings Inc. PYPL,
rose 1.2% in premarket trading on Thursday after BTIG analyst Mark Palmer updated shares to buy from neutral, citing traction for the company’s cryptocurrency platform. PayPal announced in October that it will start allowing users to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin BTCUSD,
via the PayPal platform, and Palmer said that Paxos, a private company that supports PayPal’s cryptographic efforts, “has seen its trading volume grow impressively in recent weeks.” He expects the “vast majority” of the volume on Paxos’ itBit cryptocurrency to reflect transactions for PayPal customers, leading to his projection that the cryptocurrency could add more than $ 1 billion to PayPal’s annual revenue by 2022. More importantly, the traction seen in itBit’s growing cryptocurrency volumes bodes well for the growth and active involvement of the PYPL account, “he wrote. PayPal will also allow customers to make online purchases using their cryptocurrency holdings, which Palmer He said it would be a lower-cost financing mechanism for PayPal compared to when people use their service to fund online purchases with their credit cards. “The result is that lower-cost financing is associated with using cryptocurrencies. financing of commercial transactions could provide an increase in the take-up rate and its margins “, he wrote, while setting a iv price of 300 USD for shares. PayPal shares have risen 110% in the last 12 months as the S&P 500 SPX,
gained 16%.