[Crypto News] PayPal uses blockchain technology to tokenize rewards for staff

It seems ironic

Yet equally telling when one of the biggest, most well-known online global fiat payment systems, starts rewarding its own employees using blockchain technology. PayPal has been around since 1998 under various names and leaders, the most famous of which is founder Peter Thiel, and curiously Elon Musk (for a while). Now even the fiat payment giant is turning to blockchain for internal solutions.

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What I find interesting is

That here we have possibly the most well-established and internationally recognised online digital fiat payment system, now taking to blockchain technology, the foundation of all cryptocurrencies - and very antithesis of fiat currency. So you have the world leader in fiat digital money transfer using crypto tech. Satoshi would be proud if he were with us today. Oh wait, he probably is with us, smiling to himself as he sees his brainchild become the platform for even fiat-based giants like PayPal.

Remember it was PayPal CFO John Rainey who said in May this year (2018) that PayPal merchants aren’t interested in crypto, because it is too volatile. And it was former CEO Bill Harris who said in April “Bitcoin is a scam”. He was, of course, dismissed after only a month at the job.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though

PayPal is not launching a cryptocurrency. Bitcoin and altcoins are only one use of blockchain technology, the open source distributed ledger system. They are however, tokenizing rewards for their employees by using an “internal blockchain-based incentive platform”. This simply goes to show that blockchain is the way of the future. There simply is nothing better when it comes to trustless smart contract design, where one can transfer value without even using money to represent that value.

It took 25 staff

A total of six months at their innovation lab to build the platform for PayPal, which tells you that this is a serious investment for them. Despite all their achievement in fiat transference, digital payment, as well as being traded on the Nasdaq and S&P500, this company is transcending fiat and launching their own system of “tokenomics”. It seems a net income of just under US$1.8 billion (in 2017 according to wikipeida) is not enough to keep them away from the allure of the token economy.

Today everything can be tokenized and traded for value

Blockchain has ushered in a revolution in money, currency and the meaning of wealth beyond nationally printed fiat cash, which is, in effect, nothing more than a promissory note of paper with a sovereign’s face on it. PayPal has jumped aboard the bandwagon and is incentivising innovation among its employees by offering them, in exchange, a reward that has no cash value whatsoever. That reward is experience.

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They are willing to pay their staff in tokens

Which are worthless outside of PayPal itself but which can be traded for over 100 different experiences within the company. Staff can trade their tokens or they can redeem them. And what exactly are these experiences that staff can receive? Well, the experiences that have been tokenized and given value include “poker tournaments with a couple of their vice presidents, a trail run and coffee with CFO John Rainey, and morning martial arts with CEO Dan Schulman.”

That, my dear friends

Is what has been deemed a worthwhile exchange of value at the largest fiat based financial payment system in the world. That or your manager’s dog for the day. Seriously. All of these experiences and others have been tokenized and placed on the blockchain as tradable assets for staff of PayPal. Using the blockchain to tokenize loyalty programs such as this is not new. Among others, Spanish banking giant BBVA has used a similar internal token initiative to reward staff who train others or learn new skills. It seems that even in banks money has become redundant.

PayPal has in fact

Been exploring blockchain technology for some years now. Peter Thiel was a big investor in EOS earlier this year, via its company Block.one. Even as far back as 2014 the Thiel Foundation awarded Ethereum founder (Doctor)Vitalik Buterin a $100 000 sponsorship. He qualified due to being bright and only twenty years old, a prerequisite for the funding. That year Thiel himself said about Bitcoin that it “was founded on the same set of ideas as PayPal, but which was developed in an entirely different direction." He was implying that Bitcoin had developed a currency whereas PayPal hadn’t. They are even trying to patent a system to speed up crypto transactions using secondary private keys, though some are calling them out by saying it has already been done.

Ultimately what this tells me

Is that blockchain (and by association cryptocurrency) is here to stay. PayPal is using it. Banks are using it. And so many multi-billion dollar financial corporations can’t all be wrong. Other PayPal execs have also left the firm for blockchain dev companies. Just this month Tyson Hackwood, head of their Australian branch, left PayPal for crypto.com as its senior vice president and head of global merchant acquisition. As you may remember, they were originally the cryptocurrency Monaco. And David Marcus left in 2014 already to join crypto giant Coinbase. He has since left Coinbase to become head of blockchain for Facebook. And that should say it all. If even Facebook has a blockchain department and is considering launching their own cryptocurrerncy, then we can say emphatically that today in 2018 blockchain rules the waves...the internet waves.

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Who knows how long PayPal has left

Or banks for that matter. These financial giants are all being outpaced by the new emerging financial tech of the blockchain distributed ledger. Life will never be the same again as we watch an era of fiat financialisation come to an end, probably in our lifetimes, gladly to be replaced by Satoshi Nakamoto’s pride and joy.

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