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All eligible PayPal accountholders in the U.S. can now buy, hold and sell cryptocurrency, the company announced Thursday.

PayPal said Thursday that it is opening up its nascent cryptocurrency services to all eligible U.S. users.

“We are pleased to announce that all eligible PayPal accountholders in the U.S. can now buy, hold and sell cryptocurrency directly with PayPal,” the firm said in a statement.

The move follows disclosures of high demand from PayPal’s leadership. On an earnings call earlier this month, PayPal CEO Daniel Schulman remarked that “our base is very eager for us to offer these capabilities” and that the firm’s waiting list was bigger than expected.

A representative referenced the degree of demand in the email, noting how PayPal is also lifting its weekly purchase limit for cryptocurrencies as well.

“Due to initial demand from our customers, we’ve also increased our weekly cryptocurrency purchase limit from $10K/week to $20K/week,” the spokesperson said.

PayPal went public with its crypto offerings plan in late October, as reported at the time.

© 2020 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

For its long-term viability, decentralized finance cannot be defined by a single blockchain network.

Zapper announced Thursday an extension of its seed investment round with new backing from Delphi Digital and Coinbase.

Bitcoin breached $16,000 early Thursday morning, soaring to its highest point since January 2018.

The largest digital currency by market capitalization was trading up 2.4% in the past 24 hours at $16,102 per coin at last check. The cryptocurrency was outperforming broader equity markets with the S&P500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average, as both traded slightly in the red. Financial media tied the dip to a dampening of enthusiasm over the market impact of a potential Covid-19 vaccine. 

“The vaccine will be no quick fix,” noted Invesco’s Georgina Taylor. 

This marks an interesting breakout for bitcoin, which for much of the pandemic has traded in lockstep with risk-on assets like stocks. 

It’s not exactly clear what is driving bitcoin higher. Traders and investors tell The Block that recent price action could be tied to firms allocating to bitcoin as part of a treasury reserve strategy, following in the steps of MicroStrategy and Square. 

“Price action substantiates that somewhat,” said Thejas Nalval, co-founder of Parataxis, a crypto hedge fund. “Looks like consistent TWAP with every dip being bough with blocks.”

“The public company treasury trade is real,” explained Parataxis CEO Edward Chin. “Suspect we will see more announcements in February when 4Q’20 earnings come out as the volume really started picking up in October following the PayPal news.”

© 2020 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Ant’s suspended IPO exposes potential financial risks posed by the fintech giant’s digital payment platform Alipay. The digital yuan may be China’s attempt at a solution.

API3, which is developing a network for decentralized application programming interfaces, or APIs, has raised $3 million in seed funding, according to a Thursday announcement.

The seed round was led by Placeholder Capital, with participation from Accomplice, CoinFund, Digital Currency Group, Hashed and Pantera Capital. API3 sold 10 million of its tokens to the funds, which will vest over a two-year period, per API3’s statement.

API3 said that other seed investors include Block0, Equilibrium, Rarestone Capital and Solidity Ventures.

The private sale of tokens comes ahead of a planned public sale, the date for which has yet to be released. The tokens, as explained in a September blog post, will serve as the primary governance mechanism for API3’s network alongside a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO. API3 describes itself as “a collaborative effort to build, manage and monetize decentralized APIs (dAPIs) at scale.”

© 2020 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Hedge fund titan Ray Dalio says bitcoin could be due for a reckoning. It didn’t bother bitcoin: Prices rallied, and holders are holding on.

A decentralized protocol allowing dApp developers to integrate their applications with different blockchains has received $3.75 million in seed investments.

Binance X, the exchange’s Smart Chain Accelerator Fund, and DCVC were among those who invested in the Axelar protocol. The funds and support of investors, including AngelList CEO and founder Naval Ravikant, will be used to “accelerate the roadmap” and scale the protocol. 

Founding team members of the Algorand blockchain developed the protocol, aiming to “frictionlessly connect all blockchain ecosystems that speak different languages.” The protocol acts as a translator between stand-alone blockchains, meaning dApp developers won’t have to rewrite their applications to integrate from one network to another.

Axelar co-founder and CEO Sergey Gorbunov said the idea is to create a unified approach for developers to communicate with the entire ecosystem, which has become a growing need as more blockchain platforms emerge. 

Axelar itself is powered by a decentralized open network of validators with a governance mechanism that allows the system to continue to run even if some nodes fail or supply incorrect information.

© 2020 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

API3, a firm aiming to provide an alternative to oracle service Chainlink, has raised $3 million in a private funding round led by Placeholder.