PayPal, Venmo Team Up for Wider Crypto Access

The collaboration between ENS Labs, PayPal, and Venmo could boost cryptocurrency adoption and help the market reach its first billion users.

Connecting Web2 and Web3 users through this new integration may be crucial to achieving widespread acceptance of cryptocurrency payments.

The most popular payment acquirer in the world, Venmo, has recently adopted ENS, or the Web3, human-readable crypto address, making transferring cryptocurrency using ENS identities simpler.

Marta Cura, director of business development at ENS Labs, believes the new integration could pave the way for Bitcoin payments to become widely accepted.

According to Cura, the agreement is the first step in bringing Web2 and Web3 users together:

“The integration within PayPal and Venmo goes way beyond ENS. It’ll translate and it’ll open up use cases with different payment providers, hopefully with different types of business models and e-commerce.”

ENS names streamline transactions and lower the possibility of human error by substituting straightforward nicknames, such as “Thomas.” eth, with intricate, 42-character-long hexadecimal Ethereum-based crypto addresses.

According to Dune data, there are around two million ENS names—a total of 1.94 million ENS names made by over 888,000 individual participants—in the database.

The mainstream adoption of crypto still requires TradFi.

Real-world blockchain solutions will be necessary to unify Web2 and Web3 users.

ENS’ Cura clarified that the acceptance of cryptocurrency payments will also depend on traditional finance (TradFi) companies:

“We need to take a step back from the speed that we’re used to and work with the existing railways of traditional finance.”

Cura continued that Web3 might gain from conventional financial companies’ clout, but TradFi corporations require more time to collaborate because of their strict approval and governance protocols.

Address poisoning frauds could be stopped via ENS names.

The enhanced user experience from ENS Web3 usernames could stop the increasing number of address poisoning schemes.

Address poisoning, also known as address spoofing, is a scam where scammers send a small amount of digital assets to a wallet that looks a lot like the address of the potential victim in the hopes that the victim will inadvertently copy and send money to their address.

An unlucky trader lost $68 million in an address-poisoning scam at the start of May due to a single transaction that moved most of his assets to a phony wallet.

According to Cure, the over $70 million loss could have been easily prevented with an ENS username:

“This entire situation could have been easily avoidable had this person just used an ENS name. And $70 million, that’s such a huge loss… Every single day there’s people being drained of their funds because they didn’t see that that one character was wrong.”

The $68 million was returned by the burglar on May 13 in an odd but fortunate turn of events that began when multiple onchain investigators started to provide information on his possible IP addresses in Hong Kong.