eBay is one of the biggest e-commerce companies worldwide. Ever since the inception of Bitcoin many analysts speculated that eBay could adopt Bitcoin and open up to cryptocurrencies in general. With PayPal adopting Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash in late 2020 many people believed that eBay would follow soon after its former subsidiary.

Will eBay enter crypto and what would be the implications? In today’s article we are going to dig a little bit deeper.

eBay was always into cryptocurrencies

While eBay hasn’t adopted cryptocurrencies as payment method yet, it had several ties to the crypto industry in a broader sense. It became even part of the Libra association which only recently rebranded into Diem.

But it seems that eBay wasn’t convinced that Diem would succeed and so the company left the project together with VISA and Mastercard in October 2019. It is noteworthy that VISA and Mastercard had started their own projects making use of cryptos and especially stablecoins. It seems that it is only a matter of time until eBay will adopt these solutions too.

NFTs and cryptocurrencies

In an interview with CNBC the CEO of eBay Jamie Iannone told that his company is indeed interested into crypto, but not only in currencies. According to Iannone eBay was always the number one marketplace for collectibles and the company would like to make sure that this will also be the case in the future.

Iannone mentioned that eBay is already offering NFTs, but the marketplace did not adopt a full fledge blockchain solution. It sticks to its old centralized model and it remained open if the company would build a designated marketplace for NFTs powered by blockchain technology.

Cryptocurrencies are also something that eBay is considering, but there was no statement when or how the company could adopt cryptos.

What to make of this?

The statements of Iannone were relatively vague given the fact that other companies already made their move. If eBay is going to use cryptos as payment it would be great, but also a little bit late considering the fact that PayPal has already gave US-customers the option to pay with crypto.

However, NFTs are a young and fresh market that is in a very early stage and up to this point nobody is dominating it. There are of course successful platforms, but there is still enough room to grow for eBay. If the company is moving in time they would get a chance to become one of the biggest players.