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Article by: Ian Allison

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Fintech giant PayPal plans to roll out direct sales of cryptocurrency to its 325 million users, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Currently, PayPal can be used as an alternative means for withdrawing funds from exchanges such as Coinbase, but this would be a first in terms of offering direct sales of crypto.

“My understanding is that they are going to allow buys and sells of crypto directly from PayPal and Venmo,” a well-placed industry source told CoinDesk. “They are going to have some sort of a built-in wallet functionality so you can store it there.” 

It is unclear which or how many cryptocurrencies would be available. The industry source said they expected PayPal “would be working with multiple exchanges to source liquidity.”

A second source confirmed that PayPal is looking to offer buying and selling of crypto and said the service could be expected “in the next three months, maybe sooner.”

PayPal declined to comment on the plans.

San Francisco-based crypto exchange Coinbase and Luxembourg-based Bitstamp were mentioned as likely contenders by the sources. Both Coinbase and Bitstamp declined to comment. 

It’s worth noting that PayPal has a longstanding relationship with Coinbase, going back as early as 2016. In 2018, Coinbase made instant fiat withdrawals to PayPal available for U.S. customers. Last year, European Coinbase users could withdraw to their PayPal accounts, followed by users in Canada. 

Meanwhile, fintech apps that offer crypto are making money. Square, the payments unicorn launched by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, rolled out bitcoin purchases in its Cash App in mid-2018. Cash App reported $306 million in bitcoin revenue in its most recent earnings report.

London-based Revolut, which began offering crypto to users following a 2017 partnership with Bitstamp, raised $500 million in February, valuing the platform at $5.5 billion. Robinhood, the fintech app thought to be fueling the recent retail boom in equities day trading, first offered crypto in February 2018. 

Crypto is increasingly seen as an obvious way to bolster user numbers on fintech apps and create new revenue streams. Indeed, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman has made it clear his plan this year is to aggressively monetize Venmo, which has over 52 million accounts.

Hiring push

Around the start of 2020, PayPal posted job openings to ramp up its new Blockchain Research Group. PayPal posted eight engineering positions: four in San Jose and four in Singapore.

Following PayPal’s short-lived dalliance with the Facebook-led Libra project last year, the focus now is expanding its own payments expertise, one of the sources added.

In an interview with CoinDesk earlier this year, PayPal Chief Technology Officer Sri Shivananda said the company wanted its own “perspective and view on [blockchain] technology itself to see how it can help us contribute to the concept of creating an open digital payments platform that can serve everyone.” 

Shivananda said he was unable to comment on any of PayPal’s specific plans.

“We are a strong believer in the potential of blockchain. The digitization of currency is only a matter of when not if,” Shivananda said.

This is your next move for your student loans.

Here’s what you need to know.

Student Loans

The Senate will likely reject the HEROES Act – the new $3 trillion stimulus bill passed by the House of Representatives – in its current form. The HEROES Act includes several benefits, including a second stimulus check for $1,200. If you have student loans, the most important provision for you is likely student loan forgiveness. Under the HEROES Act, if you’re struggling financially, you could be eligible to receive $10,000 of federal student loan forgiveness and $10,000 of private student loan forgiveness. Well, here’s the thing: Don’t expect student loan forgiveness in the next stimulus bill. So, given that, what should you do next with your student loans? Here are 5 hacks you can do right now and how they help you:

Hack #1: Get a lower student loan payment when your income drops

If you’re struggling to pay off your student loans, then you will want to enroll in an income-driven repayment plan. There are four types:

• Income-Based Repayment (IBR)
• Pay As You Earn (PAYE)
• Revised Pay As You Earn (REPAYE)
• Income-Contingent Repayment (ICR)

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Income-driven repayment plans are for federal student loans only, and are based on your discretionary income, family size and state of residency. If you are unemployed, furloughed or experienced a pay cut – and you already enrolled in an income-driven repayment plan – now is a smart time to re-certify your income with your student loan servicer (the company where you make monthly student loan payments). Currently, federal student loan payments are paused, so your new monthly payment begins after September 30, 2020. At that time, your monthly payment will be based off your new income. Plus, if the HEROES Act gets passed and doesn’t include student loan forgiveness, you can still receive student loan forgiveness through an income-driven repayment plan after 20 or 25 years. 

How This Helps You: You can get a lower monthly payment if your income has changed, and it will automatically take effect after September 30 when you resume federal payments for your student loans.

Hack #2: Get tax-free student loan forgiveness

With 36 million people out of work, this is not the easiest time to get a job. Many non-profits and governments have hiring freezes in the wake of COVID-19. However, if you want student loan forgiveness, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program can help you gets student loan forgiveness for your federal student loans. You may not work in public service. You may think the requirements are too difficult. You may be concerned that hardly anyone gets approved. You may think the program will be cut. These are all reasonable concerns. However, if you can find an eligible public service or non-profit employer, borrowers have received public service loan forgiveness.

How This Helps You: You can receive student loan forgiveness for your federal student loans and won’t owe any income tax on the amount of your student loan forgiveness.

Hack #3: Get your student loan payments paused even if you don’t qualify

If you have FFELP loans, unfortunately the CARES Act (the $2 trillion financial stimulus package) doesn’t help you save money on your student loans. The HEROES Act, like several other proposals, would help save you money on your student loans if you have FFELP loans. What if the HEROES Act doesn’t pass the Senate? You can use student loan consolidation as your next hack. A Direct Consolidation Loan is a smart tool to organize your separate federal student loans into a single loan so you only have one monthly payment, one payment date and one student loan servicer. The only downside: your new interest rate is simply a weighted average of your current interest rates (not lower), rounded up to the nearest 1/8%.

How This Helps You: FFELP loans are not owned by the federal government, so borrowers are missing out on all the student loan benefits under the CARES Act. However, there’s a hack for your FFELP loans, and it’s called a Direct Loan Consolidation. Once you have a Direct Consolidation Loan, you can now be eligible to pause your federal student loan payments, get 0% interest and not have your wages garnished to pay your federal student loans — through September 30. Your federal student loans also would be eligible for public service loan forgiveness.

Hack #4: Pay off your private student loans twice a month

Who said you have to make a monthly student loan payment? Your student loan servicer. Guess what? You can pay your student loans more often than once a month. This is particularly important for private student loans, since the CARES Act did not help you pause private student loan payments. If you owe $600 a month, you could split your payment into bi-weekly payments of $300 each. Or, you could pay $150 a week. Make sure to alert your student loan servicer in writing so that they apply your payments correctly, and do not hold your additional payment until the next payment cycle.

How This Helps You: It’s the same monthly payment, but by paying more frequently, you will save interest costs. So, the timing of your payments matters. 

Hack #5: Get a lower interest rate — permanently

How do you get a lower interest rate for your student loans? Answer: student loan refinancing. If you are unemployed or furloughed, then student loan refinancing is not right for you right at this time. However, if you are employed, student loan refinancing is one of the smartest moves you can make right now. Student loan refinancing helps you get a lower interest rate and pay off your student loans faster. You can refinance federal student loans, private student loans or both. Why would you refinance your student loans if federal payments are paused and the interest is 0%? Well, you could refinance your private student loans only (and keep your federal student loans outstanding). Or, you could refinance both your federal student loans and private student loans. While your federal student loans payments are temporarily paused, your student loan balance is not going away after September 30. Plus, student loan refinancing rates are very low.

This student loan refinancing calculator shows your how much money you can save when you refinance student loans.

How This Helps You: You can get a lower interest rate permanently, which helps you pay off student loans faster and save money. 

Final Thoughts

If the HEROES Act doesn’t pass – and you don’t receive student loan forgiveness – you need to get prepared now. With all the financial and economic pressure, it may be hard to process everything right now. However, simply waiting for a solution like student loan forgiveness won’t help you. Take the time upfront to get a student loan repayment plan so you can save money now and pay off your student loans faster.

Resources: Student Loans

Don’t expect student loan forgiveness or a $2,000 a month stimulus check

Student loan forgiveness reduced in new stimulus bill

Here’s when Social Security recipients get their stimulus check

Navient settles lawsuit — what it means for your student loans

Should you pay off student loans during COVID-19?

How COVID-19 affects student loan forgiveness

Here’s everything that’s happened to your student loans in 2 weeks

15 most popular questions about student loans and Coronavirus

How long do your unemployment benefits last?

How to pay your student loans during Coronavirus

Student loan forgiveness benefits these members of Congress

How to get financial relief for your student loans during Coronavirus

5 ways to lower your student loan payments during Coronavirus

Student loan refinancing rates are incredibly cheap

Source- Forbes: Zach Friedman

 Twitter or LinkedIn. 
Check out his website or some of my other work here. Zack Friedman

Recently reported at Coindesk by Wolfie Zhao:

“The bitcoin network just fine-tuned a key parameter to coax back miners who quit after last week’s halving hammered their profits.

More than 20 exahashes per second (EH/s) of computing power – the equivalent of around 1.5 million older-generation mining machines – has been switched off from Bitcoin since the network’s halving.

The seven-day rolling average of bitcoin’s hashrate has dropped over 20% from around 122 EH/s just prior to the halving on May 11 to now 97 EH/s. The once-in-four-years event reduced miners’ block rewards from 12.5 to 6.25 bitcoin (BTC) per block.

The hashrate drop after the halving has significantly outrun the hashing sprint prior to it. As such, bitcoin’s mining difficulty, which measures how hard it is to compete for block rewards, decreased 6% to 15.14 Trillion at 2:00 UTC on Wednesday in the network’s first biweekly difficulty adjustment since the halving.

The amount of computing power connected to bitcoin has been on a roller-coaster ride over the past two weeks.

Read more: Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Nears All-Time High in Final Adjustment Before Halving

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty adjusts itself every 2,016 blocks, roughly 14 days, to ensure the average interval between blocks remains at 10 minutes. If a large number of miners are switched off from the network, resulting in a longer-than-10-minute average block interval, the difficulty will decrease to encourage participation.

And bitcoin’s third halving on May 11 happened exactly at the halfway mark of the previous 2,016-block difficulty cycle.

“We believe that, as the halving drew closer, miners in China did a sprint run of mining, even with older generation machines, to make most of the last days of the higher block rewards,” said Kevin Zhang, director of blockchain strategies at Greenidge Generation, a New York-based natural gas power plant that mines bitcoin.

Alejandro De La Torre, vice president of the mining pool PoolIn, agreed that miners were switching on to mine as much as possible before the halving.

“That’s why we saw those sky-high hash rate figures,” he said. But as the halving kicked in midway, he said, miners that were marginally profitable had to switch off.

Read more: Bitcoin Halving Arrives: Mining Rewards Drop for Third Time in History

According to miner profitability data tracked by PoolIn and F2Pool, at bitcoin’s current price and difficulty old generations of miners won’t be profitable with an electricity rate that’s above $0.05 per kilowatt-hour.

Mitigating factors

That said, the drop in mining competition is helpful to those still in the game that have more efficient equipment and cheaper electricity since they can earn a bigger share of the 900 BTC minted every day.

With the difficulty adjustment, De La Torre expects some, but not all, of these miners to switch back on.

“Consider also, the wet season in China is bringing the cost of electricity even lower,” he said.

Read more: New York Power Plant Sells 30% of Its Bitcoin Mining Hashrate to Institutional Buyers

In a report released May 1, PoolIn estimated that the computing power contributed by miners at the “lower quartile” – older models that compute 0-25 terahashes per second – accounted for 15% to 30% of the network’s total at the time.

“While we expect most of these miners will shut down after the halving, it is likely that some of them have cheap enough electricity to survive in the near future,” the firm said in the report.

As the summer rainy season approaches in China, mining farms in the country’s southwestern provinces have been trying to attract customers with electricity rates as low as $0.03 per kilowatt-hour.

Following the halving, the total transaction fees paid to Bitcoin miners have also been on the rise, data shows. Apart from block rewards, miners earn fees that are attached to each transaction on the Bitcoin network.

Read more: BitMEX Is Making Bitcoin Network More Expensive for Everyone, Researcher Finds

Total daily network transaction fees have jumped from around 30 BTC at the end of April to over 160 BTC, and now account for roughly 17% of miners’ daily revenue.

“Another interesting observation we made is the significant rise of the transaction fees as a percentage of the block rewards. Yesterday, transaction fees comprised nearly a quarter of Greenidge’s pool payouts,” said Zhang. “With this percentage currently in the range of 15-20%, it remains to be seen how this percentage may change and affect the incentive of miners.”

The question Robert gets asked a lot is, “Won’t Free Money Destroy the USA?”
Watch as Robert explains—from his living room—exactly what will happen to the U.S. economy while the Fed prints more and more fake money. He’ll also explain three things you can do to financially survive the new economy the world is experiencing.