Yesterday, Visa made headlines in the crypto space by announcing that it will be the first major payment network to use stablecoins to settle transactions using the Ethereum blockchain.

PayPal announced this morning that it will allow U.S. consumers to pay online merchants directly in cryptocurrency through its new cryptocurrency payment service.

While I can’t stress enough how positive these two updates are for crypto asset adoption and the future of the Web 3.0-based global economy, and the resulting price action has been largely positive, I feel like the headlines coming from these major payment service providers have been somewhat recycled.

Didn’t we hear those two announcements last year?

Don’t get me wrong, the fact that Visa is participating in a pilot project with crypto.com is simply stunning. It should be noted that they do not intend to channel all international payments through the USDC.

However, only a portion of crypto.com Visa card program obligations will use this new settlement option.

Honestly, I found it hard to tell the difference between the last PayPal update and the 12th update. November.

As with Tesla, there was a big scoop when the company announced its plans, and another when it actually implemented them.

As far as I know, PayPal still doesn’t allow people to fund their accounts with bitcoins, or withdraw digital currency. They just let people spend the fake bitcoins they keep in their PayPal wallets.

Of course I’ve been wrong before, but it seems doubtful that this is what will get us past the massive resistance of $60,000 in bitcoins.

Actual determination

Without a doubt, these two giant companies are making great strides that are accelerating the adoption of blockchain and crypto.

The new strategy makes sense for Visa, which considers itself a network of networks and tends to be currency agnostic. In fact, they already support 160 currencies in over 200 markets.

The fact that they are now experimenting with firing pens makes sense.

As we’ve said many times before, unlike China’s top-down approach to central bank digital currency, the U.S. will likely move to a more decentralized system for the digital dollar, in which we will have many different dollar standards issued by financial institutions.

The real breakthrough is that they chose to experiment with the Circle network, based on Ethereum. But I don’t see how this is good for bitcoin.

PayPal messages can actually lead to mass adoption, depending on how people use it. Even if they don’t allow users to keep their keys, it doesn’t make sense that they don’t secure bitcoin exposure.

So presumably they have at least a fair share of BTC to support customer assets.

Then there is the issue of taxes. Ray Dalio is there, so listen up. The government will not try to shut down cryptocurrencies.

They will seek to combat use outside their system by taxing competing sectors of the market. Almost all transactions in the NMT market seem to be taxable, and as we know, no one wants to pay capital gains to buy concert tickets.

Dollar increases

We haven’t had too much of a crypto rally while stocks are down due to a strong dollar and rising bond yields, so today was definitely interesting.

Here, the dollar is at its highest point in five months, in its strongest rally since Pandemic V.

As for the major cryptocurrencies, there are still a few technical levels to break through, but if current activity picks up, we could easily see the market move much higher.

If they fail, we will likely see further consolidation. Let’s see what happens.

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