What if PayPal would have created a PayPal coin?

~~Lastly I was thinking a lot on how to define the potential market cap value for ingame coins, like Siacoin, Dentacoin, Burst or even Linden-Dollar. I call them ingame coins since their primary use is focused on one specific usecase. Obviously we know they are not limited to it, but they are basically like vouchers. In specific I was trying to research if the Request Network token is already overpriced.

What do you mean by PayPal coin?

Each dollar you spent on PayPal is transferred to the central PayPal bank account. As soon as it is in there you can call it PayPal dollar, beacuse if you pay someone with those PayPal dollar there is no real dollar transferred instantly to the bank account of the recipient. It is basically just noticed in their database that the recipient has XX PayPal dollar more in his account. So this databse is a very simple blockchain and the PayPal dollar in fact is a cryptocurrency, I call it the Paypal coin.

But it is not tradeable so who cares?

The PayPal dollar is not tradeable anywhere else than on the PayPal websites or connected merchant websites. But beacuse of the simple fee structure PayPal is using it is quite easy to calculate the market cap of the PayPal dollar. The best of all: This value is not influenced by speculants.

So how to calculate the value of a Paypal coin?

We do not calculate the value of one coin, it is $US1 in the US and 1€ in the Eurozone. More important to know is the market cap: In 2016 PayPal had a revenue of roughly $11 billion. They charge fees from 10% (micropayments), but mostly 2.5% down to 1.5% (for regular payments, merchants with high volumes pay even less). So the average should be somewhere around 2% +/- 1%. So we just need to calculate the financial strength of all PayPal transactions and we get the fictive market cap of the fictive PayPal coin by using these numbers:

2% = $11 billion
100% = $550 billion

So the market cap of a fictive PayPal coin would be roughly about $550 billion.

How does this help in the crypto game?

It does not really help on calculating the speculative value of "real" currencies like Bitcoin, Monero or Raiblocks. These do not just want to replace PayPal, Visa or any payment processor, they aim to replace the dollar, euro and basically all fiat currencies also making services like PayPal almost obsolete. But it helps to calculate the real value of ingame coins, in this case for example REQ. So if REQ would be able to steal just 1% of PayPals market share, the REQ token should reach a market cap of $5 billion.~~