David Sacks, former COO of PayPal, says that cryptocurrencies are fulfilling the company’s original vision of a global currency.
During a recent interview with CNBC, Sacks mentioned a renewed interest in the payments world not felt since his involvement with PayPal over 15 years ago. He views digital currencies as having the potential to fulfill, and exceed, the vision of his former company. Bitcoin recently approached, and briefly exceeded, PayPal’s market cap, but as of yet lags behind as a payment system, both in transaction volume and the competitiveness of its fees.
A decentralized ledger vs. PayPal’s centralized ledger
As Sacks stated in the CNBC interview, payment systems are simply ledgers for balancing out credits and debits from various accounts, and PayPal sought to be that ledger:
“A payment is just a credit to one account and a debit to another. That’s a database entry. We believed that, if we could get enough people to participate, money would never need to leave the system. PayPal could become the database of money.
While the goal of a global payments database to move users off of banking systems never went through to completion, Sacks sees that cryptocurrency could accomplish this goal, only in a decentralized way.
“We added features like interest and debit cards so you’d never have to withdraw funds to the legacy banking system. When we got acquired by eBay, that project kind of stopped.
But cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are now fulfilling that original vision. They are doing it in a decentralized way (with a decentralized database called the blockchain) whereas PayPal tried to do it in a centralized way.”
Dash’s push to be a decentralized PayPal
While more actors in the financial space are waking up to digital currency’s potential as the next level of payments, Dash is already embracing that goal, with instant payments to anywhere in the world and the consistently lowest fees in the field. With the upcoming Evolution upgrade, Dash intents to further fulfill this goal of moving towards a PayPal-like experience, providing a smooth, user-friendly experience at the protocol level by early next year.
