PayPal Appoints Six-Member Advisory Council on Blockchain, Indian-Origin Neha Narula Included

PayPal, the US-based online payment processer is ramping research and development (R&D) initiatives around the crypto sector within the company. An advisory council of six members has been put in place by the San Jose, California-based company in order to get insights on crypto and blockchain technologies. The digital payments firm has been initiating crypto-supporting projects in some ways lately, and is likely to explore deeper into the sector in the coming days.

Indian-origin Neha Narula has made it to PayPal’s crypto advisory council. Narula has been the Director of MIT Media Labs’ digital currency initiative. She has previously also been in charge of a project to help the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston build a digital currency aimed at scaling for consumer usage.

“To support not only our current and future products in the space but our broader mission of leading the way towards a more affordable, efficient and inclusive digital financial system, we have established a cross-disciplinary advisory council on Blockchain, Crypto and Digital Currencies (BCDC),” the 1998-established company said in a statement.

Fortress Investment Group Co-CEO Peter Briger and Georgetown University Law Center professor Chris Brummer have also made it to the council along with Weizmann Institute of Science professor Shafi Goldwasser, former Commodity Futures Trading Commission chair Timothy Massad, and MIT Sloan School of Management finance professor Antoinette Schoar.

The development comes in the backdrop of PayPal reportedly working on its own stablecoin called PayPal Coin.

The financial firm has been making strides in the crypto sector for a while now.

In October 2020, PayPal launched a new service enabling millions of its users in the US to buy, hold, and sell cryptocurrencies.

Later in September 2021, the company launched cryptocurrency trading on the platform in the United Kingdom.

Amid this crypto services expansion, PayPal believes that “it is crucial to engage with the world’s best leaders to better understand the industry’s most compelling opportunities and complex challenges”.