Paypal is reportedly planning to offer direct sale of Bitcoin, and potentially other digital assets, according to rumours which originated on CoinDesk through anonymous sources.
The rumours appear to have been supported primarily by a number of job postings on job board. One of these posting, for a 'Blockchain Research Engineer', includes the following description:
The blockchain research group (BRG) is a newly formed group within the Strategic Technology Enablement team chartered with establishing expertise and opinions on emerging blockchain technologies and their potential uses within PayPal. As a research function, the BRG will seek to understand the current and near-future state of blockchain technologies, their relative advantages and disadvantages, and their applicability to PayPal’s core and adjacent businesses.
According to CoinDesk's anonymous sources:
[PayPal] are going to allow buys and sells of crypto directly from PayPal and Venmo
and
they are going to have some sort of a built-in wallet functionality so you can store it there.
PayPal has of course declined to comment on the rumours. However, given Paypal has more than 300 million accounts, with subsidiary Venmo facilitating over $30 billion in payments in Q1 2020, the potential new market for digital assets is substantial, and the excitement understandable. The credibility of the rumour is helped along by PayPal's historical dabbling in the digital asset space, including their integration with CoinBase, and their initial involvement and withdrawal from the Libra Association.