Adoption catalyst alert… The e-commerce giant eBay sounds like it’s heading towards enabling crypto payments, which could even occur in March, according to reports.

The company’s CEO Jamie Iannone was interviewed by media outlet The Street on Sunday, reportedly indicating eBay has been considering integrating crypto payments for quite some time and that an announcement could be made during the upcoming investor’s day on March 10.

Iannone also indicated that eBay has a forward-looking focus as it seeks to become the go-to platform for a target audience of Gen Z and Millennials.

“On March 10, we’re going to go deeper on all of these things, payments, advertising, our focus categories,” said the CEO.

He revealed to The Street that eBay is looking to transition to new payments modes as it is already managing US$85 billion of volume directly on the platform.

“We opened up Google Pay and Apple Pay,” continued Iannone. “We have a partnership with Afterpay in Australia, which is a platform that appeals to Gen Z, and that is a buy now pay later platform on the marketplace.”

While eBay has never made an official announcement that it’s embraced the NFT (non-fungible token) side of the crypto economy, the platform has, however, been accommodating the buying and selling of “digital commodities” since May 2021.

“We did change our policies last year so that you could trade NFT on the platform and essentially, you know, eBay is a place where people have something to sell and people have something by show up,” said Iannone, adding:

“eBay will be the place where people trade goods, whether they be physical or digital. So over time, you know, we want this to be the marketplace for sustainability.”

 

OpenSea nets US$3.5b in NFT trading volume for February

While the world’s economic and geopolitical situation continues its delicate knife-edge balance thanks to war in Ukraine, it seems the NFT economy’s biggest traders are still laser focused on pixelated punks, Bored Apes and myriad other digital curiosities.

Here’s an excellent Twitter thread (below) that shows some of the latest NFT market stats. The first mention jumps out immediately – the leading global NFT marketplace OpenSea has achieved a whopping US$3.5 billion in trading volume in February alone.

While that’s not as high as OpenSea’s record-breaking January (which hit a stupendous US$5 billion in volume), it still makes it the second-highest NFT trading month to date.

 

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