The international payment service, Paypal, has announced plans for a direct sales solution of cryptocurrency for its more than 325 million users.

This report is according to a few people that are familiar with Paypal's activity. For the moment, Paypal is primarily known as an alternative payment provider worldwide, allowing users to make and take payments globally. Paypal's previous relationship with cryptocurrencies offers users a means of withdrawing funds from crypto exchanges like Coinbase.

According to one of the individuals familiar with this activity, Paypal's crypto service would allow users to buy and sell crypto directly through its platform. The source goes on to explain how Paypal would make use of a dedicated soft wallet.

While this announcement comes with a lot of speculation, it remains unclear as to how many, or even what cryptocurrencies would be available for users.

The timeline for development may be shorter than we think, another source claims. The user confirmed that Paypal would be looking at other exchanges for sourcing liquidity as well as crypto assets. All of this currently has a timeline of fewer than three months.

At this moment in time, Paypal has refused to comment. Major exchanges like Coinbase and Bitstamp also join the international payments provider in declining to comment.

While Paypal has had little direct experience with crypto-assets, it has had a long working relationship with the California-based Coinbase. For example, Paypal worked with Coinbase to offer instant fiat withdrawals back in 2018 for customers in the United States. In 2019, this was followed by the expansion of these withdrawals to both the European Union and Canada.

While the market is experiencing some understandable uncertainty, fintech companies that expand into the crypto space are capitalizing well. For example, Jack Dorsey's Square, the digital payments provider, introduced support Bitcoin purchases in mid-2018. As a result of this, Square's Cash App reported more than $305 million in new revenues from BTC.

Revolut, meanwhile, rolled out support for crypto-assets off the back of a partnership with Bitstamp back in 2017. This was followed up by a successful raising of $500 million in seed capital in February this year – bringing its total market valuation to $5.5bn. Last, but not least is Robinhood, which was previously tipped to be behind the boom in equities day trading. Robinhood began offering access to cryptocurrencies back in February 2018.

What these companies do prove conclusively, and consistently, is that introducing access to cryptocurrencies is an effective way of bolstering user numbers, and earning some additional popularity.

Paypal has begun 2020 on a very bullish note with a large number of new job openings. These are seen as a strong ramp-up for its brand new Blockchain Research Group. The giveaway comes from the posting of eight engineering positions across San Jose in California and Singapore.

In the wake of Facebook's turbulent and ill-fated venture with Libra last year, and Paypal's short-lived partnership with it, the company appears to be going its own way on blockchain and cryptos.

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