Fintech giant PayPal is making steady inroads into the cryptocurrency space, without the need for an aggressive marketing campaign. Instead, it's been rolling out features and forming key partnerships to advance its digital asset strategy. This week, PayPal introduced new cryptocurrency onboarding and offboarding features for its US customers. This is significant in a climate where many crypto companies are focusing on supporting fiat-to-crypto conversions due to regulatory pressure.
Traditional asset manager Franklin Templeton has also deepened its involvement in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. The company has filed for a spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) in the United States. This move places them alongside other major investment firms seeking approval for Bitcoin investment products, including names like BlackRock and Fidelity.
Despite the long-term bearish market, new players are continually entering the digital asset world, signaling that cryptocurrencies are becoming increasingly mainstream. In this week's Crypto Biz, we'll delve into PayPal's latest crypto gateway, Franklin Templeton's BTC ETF filing, Coinbase's integration with the Lightning Network, and Meta's plans for a new artificial intelligence model.
PayPal is expanding its digital asset services by introducing new ways to buy and sell cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. The payment giant recently launched a new Web3 payment onboarding and offboarding channel, allowing US users to convert their cryptocurrencies directly into US dollars from their wallets into their PayPal balances. This feature is available for wallets, decentralized applications, and non-fungible token (NFT) markets and is now live on MetaMask. It follows PayPal's partnership with hardware wallet company Ledger, enabling US users to purchase Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin directly through Ledger hardware wallets.
Asset management firm Franklin Templeton has submitted an application to the US SEC to launch a spot Bitcoin ETF. This move comes after the SEC postponed decisions on spot ETF applications from other major players and after a court ruling requiring the SEC to consider the conversion of Grayscale's BTC futures ETF into a spot ETF. Coinbase will host the BTC for Franklin Templeton's proposed ETF, with BNY Mellon serving as the cash custodian and administrator. Franklin Templeton manages $1.5 trillion in assets.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is developing an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) model to compete with cutting-edge models like OpenAI's GPT-4. This new model from Meta will be "several times more powerful" than its Llama 2 model, which was released earlier this year and trained on 70 billion parameters. Although the exact parameters for OpenAI's GPT-4 have not been disclosed, it's estimated to be around 1.5 trillion parameters. Meta plans to make its new AI model open source, allowing other companies to use it for advanced text generation, analytics, and other applications. The company is also investing in data centers and semiconductor chips from Nvidia to support these advanced AI systems.
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has confirmed its decision to integrate the Layer 2 payments protocol, the Lightning Network (LN). This move responds to user demands for faster and cheaper Bitcoin transactions. Previously, major exchanges like Coinbase and Binance hesitated to adopt Layer-2 solutions due to concerns that LN integration could reduce their revenue. However, as the community pushed for faster and cheaper transactions, Coinbase decided to investigate the feasibility of integrating the Lightning Network.
