EBay’s Braintree May Let You Pay for Your Next Trip in Bitcoin

Braintree, the online payments processor that was recently acquired by eBay’s PayPal for $800 million, has announced that it will soon be accepting payments in bitcoin.

The ability, which was announced at the San Francisco TechCrunch Disrupt conference on Monday, and verified on Braintree’s blog, should be available in the coming months.

While some see this as PayPal’s move to start accepting bitcoin, there has been no news to suggest this will happen anytime soon. It is also unknown when or if Braintree’s most prominent clients like startups Uber and Airbnb, will choose to accept bitcoin.

To process the payments, Braintree has selected the bitcoin wallet platform Coinbase. This means that Braintree’s merchants will need to create a Coinbase wallet if they want to accept bitcoin payments. Coinbase would handle all of the bitcoin exchanges, freeing the merchant to seamlessly accept bitcoin payments (and get paid in fiat currency) without having to worry about conversion rates.

The announcement could be a boon for bitcoin, which has seen its value fluctuate severely since its inception. Bitcoin’s buy price has jumped from a few dollars in 2011, to a high of $1,242 in November of last year, and is currently hovering around the $467 mark. Since the value of bitcoin is determined by supply and demand, more steady users and higher rates of adoption should help stabilize the currency.

Overstock.com got the ball rolling for large merchants accepting bitcoin when it partnered with Coinbase in January. Overstock.com’s CEO Partick Byrne predicted in March that the company would reach $10 or $15 million in bitcoin sales by the end of the year.