Up 300 percent in 2020, bitcoin is suddenly getting respect in the C-suite. Here's how PayPal, Square and the 48 other big companies on Forbes's third annual Blockchain 50 are outpacing their competition using bitcoin and the underlying blockchain
Covid Currency: After the pandemic hit, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman (left) seized on digital cash to speed ecommerce transactions. MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor filled his company’s treasury with bitcoin as a bet against devaluation of the dollar. The move
made him a billionaire
Locked down in his Palo Alto, California, home last March, as the coronavirus spread across the US, PayPal chief executive Dan Schulman knew that the pandemic was a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity.
The pioneering electronic-payments company he took over in 2014 had been working toward a world without cash for two decades, but recently its growth had begun to slow. Over the decade after eBay acquired the startup in 2002, PayPal’s revenue grew at an average annual rate of 38 percent, but today, the company, again independent, is growing at half that rate. Now, as people retreated to their homes, online commerce and digital payments had suddenly become necessities in everyday life—for grocery shopping, banking and more.
(This story appears in the 07 May, 2021 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)