PayPal surges to record high after teasing crypto payments in 2021

Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre joins The Final Round to break down the details of PayPal's jump into the crypto market, as bitcoin leaps to a 52-week high.

Video Transcript

JEN ROGERS: Welcome back to "The Final Round." Still in the green here, just a little bit. This is time for the Crypto Corner, though, right now, with Jared Blikre going way back in the Wayback Machine here, talking about Bitcoin today, because PayPal making some big news. Jared, we, of course, have had Square in the crypto space. But PayPal, that's, like, the 800-pound gorilla. Is that what we're seeing light a fire under BTC today?

JARED BLIKRE: Oh, definitely. This is a big deal because at the beginning of next year, 26 million vendors are going to be accepting Bitcoin as payment. And that's through PayPal, the PayPal network. And that's going to increase from about 20,000 right now. So you figure 20,000 to 26 million, that's a big increase. And we are seeing that reflected in both PayPal, which is at a record high right now, 215, that's up 6%, almost 7%, for the day.

And then also taking a look at Bitcoin here. Let's just look at some charts of Bitcoin because it has been on kind of a tear recently. Here's a three-month chart. You can see, it's still up about 36%. And if we take a look back over the last year, it had broken out of a consolidation that was multi-year. And we'll take a look at that in a second.

But the trend has definitely been up. And I've mentioned the Canadian [INAUDIBLE] on this program before. He made a call in September when it was down by about 10,000. And he said it was going higher into the end of the year. He's had a target since December of last year of 16,000 for the end of this year. And it seems like it's within sights right now.

So here's a five-year chart. And we can see here's that negative trend line that we finally broke through earlier this year. And it's been up ever since. And with this latest push higher above 12,000, as long as this holds, it does look like we have some legs here. So no crazy targets in sight, but 16,000 seems pretty doable after today's price action and considering the retail and institutional support that we're seeing, the increase in both of those as it becomes more mainstream. We've got the back network and now available for payments.