1st March 2022 > > eBay again

tl;dr

ebay announces yet again that it will adopt cryptos for payment purposes.

Market Snap (at time of writing)

Market Wrap

That move means that the market cap of BTC is now greater than the money supply of the Russian Ruble, which is a nice but irrelevant fact to have at hand.

Wall Street is now up 1,700 points since the war induced sell-off early on 24th February 2022, a 5-percentage point move. My short-term target is 35,000 or above to close (NOT investment advice).

Occasional Series – RT (formerly Russia Today)

Full plaudits to the EU, and whistles of shame for the UK.

As of yesterday, RT is now banned throughout mainland Europe for spreading disinformation and lies, though sadly not in the UK.

RT will no longer be a platform in Europe for certain politicians whose knee jerk reaction always seems to be to support Russian interests over the liberal West.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – eBay

Jamie Iannone, CEO of e-commerce giant eBay, has said that the firm is looking to integrate crypto payment options into its online marketplace.

To be fair, this isn’t the first time the company has made such a claim.

Back in January 2014, when eBay and PayPal were part of the same corporate stable, a company spokesman made a promise to allow customers to buy and sell BTC, which at the time was trading between $600 and $800. If only you had taken notice of the CCC at the time …

Fast forward to November 2020 and PayPal – now separated from eBay – finally added the functionality for US customers to buy, hold, and sell a limited number of cryptos. That offering has been expanded in functionality and geographical scope. Most PayPal customers worldwide can buy and sell cryptos via PayPal, they have the option to buy goods or services using PayPal, and cryptos can be transferred off the platform to external wallets.

However, in 2019 eBay was still stating that it was “seriously considering” integrating BTC into its platform. This glacial pace of adoption sits uncomfortably with my understanding of a high-tech firm.

Finally, in May 2021, eBay began accepting NFTs for sale from whitelisted sellers:

"In the coming months, eBay will add new capabilities that bring blockchain-driven collectibles to our platform," said eBay's North America senior vice president, Jordan Sweetnam.

Back to today, and Jamie has said that an announcement of eBays proposed crypto functionality will be announced at the forthcoming investor’s day on March 10th, 2022. With $85bn of transactions daily, this will be a useful step on the road to wholesale crypto adoption.

Now we need Amazon on board.