When PaypPal was established in 1999, called Confinity at the time it was the first of its kind: a digital money transfer service.
It wasn't until March 2000 when Confinity merged with Elon Musk's X.com company that provided online banking services (the first of its kind) that the future of PayPal would be cemented.
In 2001, X.com was renamed PayPal, they expanded rapidly and became the powerhouse they are today. Musk had envisioned the future of payments would be digital and he was right.
In many ways, I see Monaco Card as the PayPal of the future. Let's look at what some of the features of Monaco Card are and how they relate.
- A virtual bank account
- Funds are insured and secure
- You can send and receive funds via the app
- You can hold multiple forms of cryptocurrency and fiat; AUD, USD, and so on
- A Visa card is attached to your virtual account
This is where PayPal stopped short, they strictly stuck to being a digital only service working with fiat currency. All funds are held in your PayPal account and if you want to spend them in person, you can't because there is no PayPal debit card.
PayPal was designed to be strictly for digital commerce only. This is what Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned in 2008, but issues plaguing Bitcoin's ability to scale have seen Bitcoin become an asset and not a transactional currency.
I actually used to believe that Bitcoin was going to be the PayPal of the future, but the high fees and fact it can take sometimes hours to send money, as well as lack of security (you can't undo a Bitcoin transaction) makes it a hard sell.
Bitcoin was supposed to be a decentralised PayPal on steroids.
The addresses that get generated via the Bitcoin blockchain or any other cryptocurrency project are error-prone because they're so long and not user-friendly whatsoever.
I am aware there are also other projects gunning for the PayPal funds transfer segment of the market like Request Network (REQ), which also looks promising. But once again, it's digital commerce only with no debit card attached.
Why can't we have the best of both worlds? A kick-ass digital and real world commerce product.
My impression is that much of PayPals growth and adoption was driven by the growth of eBay. Without eBay i don't think there would have been such a need for PayPal. One of the main features that makes this relationship so important is the buyer protection and dispute resolution. It solved a problem of a lack of trust in an arms length peer to peer transaction. Imagine sending bitcoin or ETH for an ebay purchase prior to receiving the goods or service! If someone asked me to do that i would assume a scam. I think Mona.co is a great project but i personally don't think it will offer the same type of service as PayPal