Why is Ripple CEO disappointed with PayPal’s crypto venture?

It seems that not everybody from the crypto community has warmed up to PayPal’s decision to venture into the crypto market. In a tweet calling out the payment giant’s move into crypto, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said he was disappointed with Paypal’s upcoming crypto integration since he believed this would spur the benefits of crypto as an asset: 

2 steps forward, 1 step back…Great to see a payment pioneer leaning in, BUT disappointing some fundamental tenets / benefits of crypto are spurned.

No keys and no withdrawals   

PayPal has about $350 million active accounts with $220 billion worth of payments being processed during the second quarter of 2020. It had earlier announced today that it would allow its users to buy and sell BTC, ETH, LTC, and other cryptocurrencies. However PayPal has not yet added Ripple’s XRP in the list of supported crypto on its network. 

The news nonetheless got crypto Twitter excited who were quick to correlate the event to BTC’s price surge to a high of $12,500+

However, as others have also noted, PayPal will not provide its users with a private key to their aforementioned crypto being held on its network. In fact, users can only hold their crypto in their PayPal accounts and will not be able to transfer it to other accounts on or off PayPal. 

You can only hold the Cryptocurrency that you buy on PayPal in your account. Additionally, the Cryptocurrency in your account cannot be transferred to other accounts on or off PayPal

Image Source: The Ledger

This was something Garlinghouse picked on and suspected that Paypal’s decision to not allow transfers was because there was “regulatory uncertainty“ in the U.S. The CEO of Ripple said in a tweet: 

I suspect PayPal is concerned about the (wait for it…) regulatory uncertainty, impacting its roll-out on a number of levels. 

Garlinghouse had earlier voiced his disappointments with U.S. regulations over cryptocurrencies and even threatened to move Ripple out of the country to other crypto- friendly nations. To which, one Twitter  user said that the CEO was looking for excuses to and reasons to blame why XRP wasn’t added: 

Regulatory uncertainty hasn’t held back BTC, ETH, LTC & others; but lets blame the USA Gov because they control the “fate” of only XRP, a global decentralized asset, but not other crypto assets; just XRP

Other users chimes in with similar views:

Meanwhile one user asked whether PayPal saw Ripple as a competitor and did not want to add liquidity for XRP.