PayPal has launched its cryptocurrency service in the U.K.
PayPal
LONDON — PayPal is launching its cryptocurrency service in the U.K.
The U.S. online payments giant said Monday it would let British customers buy, hold and sell digital currencies, starting this week.
It marks the the first international expansion of PayPal’s crypto product, which first launched in the U.S. in October last year.
“It has been doing really well in the U.S.,” Jose Fernandez da Ponte, PayPal’s general manager for blockchain, crypto and digital currencies, told CNBC. “We expect it’s going to do well in the U.K.”
PayPal’s crypto feature lets customers buy or sell bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ethereum or litecoin with as little as £1. Users can also track crypto prices in real-time, and find educational content on the market.
Like the U.S. version of the product, PayPal is relying on Paxos, a New York-regulated digital currency company, to enable crypto buying and selling in the U.K. PayPal said it has engaged with relevant U.K. regulators to launch the service.
A spokesperson for the Financial Conduct Authority, Britain’s financial services watchdog, was not immediately available for comment on the announcement.
Growing adoption
PayPal’s crypto service is similar to one from U.K. fintech firm Revolut. As is the case with Revolut, PayPal users can’t move their crypto holdings outside the app. Although Revolut recently started testing a feature that lets users withdraw bitcoin to their own personal wallets.
PayPal says its foray into crypto is about making it easier for people to participate in the market. “The tokens and coins have been around for a while but you had to be a relatively sophisticated user to be able to access that,” da Ponte said. “Having that on a platform like ours makes a really good entry point.”
The payments processor is one of many large finance companies taking a leap into the mostly unregulated world of cryptocurrencies. Despite ongoing concerns about price volatility, consumer protection and potential money laundering in the industry, major firms including Mastercard, Tesla and Facebook have been warming to crypto lately.
Bitcoin, the world’s biggest digital currency, hit a record high of nearly $65,000 in April before tumbling below $30,000 in July as Chinese regulators extended a crackdown on the market. It has since recovered to a price of $48,400.
While PayPal started with crypto trading, the company is betting digital currencies will take a greater role in e-commerce in the long run. Earlier this year, PayPal started letting U.S. consumers use crypto to pay at millions of its online merchants globally. The firm also expanded crypto buying and selling to Venmo, its popular mobile wallet.
“We definitely have ambitions to continue to expand the product range in the U.S., the U.K. and other markets,” da Ponte said.
“We are very deliberate about starting with initial functionality, and then we’ll see where the market is going to take us. Different markets have different appetite for products.”
‘Britcoin’
The launch of PayPal’s crypto service in the U.K. also comes as regulators become increasingly wary about the rise of digital currencies. In June, the FCA banned the British subsidiary of Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, citing a failure to meet money-laundering requirements.
“It makes sense that, as there is increased consumer interest and increased volume, the regulators are putting more attention into this space,” da Ponte said, adding that PayPal has built “strong regulatory relations.”
Meanwhile, central banks are exploring the potential issuance of their own digital currencies, as cash use in a number of developed countries dwindles rapidly. In April, the U.K. Treasury and Bank of England said they would evaluate the potential launch of a digital version of the British pound, dubbed “Britcoin” by the U.K. press.
Da Ponte said central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, were a “fantastic prospect” but it would take policymakers some time to iron out the key issues involved.
Chris Martin of Coldplay performs live at San Siro Stadium, Milan, Italy, in July 2017.
Mairo Cinquetti | NurPhoto | Getty Images
Days after Astronomer CEO Andy Byron resigned from the tech startup, the HR exec who was with him at the infamous Coldplay concert has left as well.
“Kristin Cabot is no longer with Astronomer, she has resigned,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email to CNBC Thursday. Cabot was the company’s chief people officer.
Cabot and Byron, who is married with children, were shown in an intimate moment on the ‘kiss cam’ at a recent Coldplay show in Boston, and immediately hid when they saw their faces on the big screen. Lead singer Chris Martin said, “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.” An attendee’s video of the incident went viral.
Byron resigned from the company on Saturday. Both Cabot and Byron have been removed the company’s leadership team webpage.
Pete DeJoy, Astronomer’s interim CEO, wrote in a post earlier this week that recent and unexpected national attention has turned the company into “a household name.”
In May, the New York-based company, which commercializes open source software, announced a $93 million investment round led by Bain Ventures and other investors, including Salesforce Ventures.
Elon Musk‘s satellite internet service Starlink said it had a “network outage” on Thursday. The company said it was working on a solution.
There were more than 60,000 reports of an outage on Downdetector, a site that logs issues.
Starlink is owned and operated by SpaceX, which is also run by Musk.
Musk apologized for the outage on his social media platform X and said, “Service will be restored shortly.”
Musk posted earlier Thursday that the company’s direct-to-cell-phone service was “growing fast” following the announcement that T-Mobile‘s Starlink-powered satellite service was available to the public.
T-Mobile said the T-Satellite service was built to keep phones connected “in places no carrier towers can reach.”
Starlink didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Starlink internet speeds and reliability decrease with popularity, a recent study found.
It wasn’t immediately clear if the T-Satellite service was affected by or involved in the outage.
The Intel logo is displayed on a sign in front of Intel headquarters on July 16, 2025 in Santa Clara, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Intel reported second-quarter results on Thursday that beat Wall Street expectations on revenue, as the company’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan announced significant cuts in chip factory construction. The stock ticked higher in extended trading.
Here’s how the chipmaker did versus LSEG consensus estimates:
Earnings per share: Loss of 10 cents per share, adjusted.
Revenue: $12.86 billion versus $11.92 billion estimated
Intel said it expects revenue for the third-quarter of $13.1 billion at the midpoint of its range, versus the average analyst estimate of $12.65 billion. The chipmaker said that it expects to break even on earnings while analysts were looking for earnings of 4 cents per share.
For the second quarter, Intel reported a net loss of $2.9 billion, or 67 cents per share, compared with a $1.61 billion net loss, or 38 cents per share, in the year-earlier period. Earnings per share were not comparable to analyst estimates due to an $800 million impairment charge, “related to excess tools with no identified re-use,” the company said. That resulted in an EPS adjustment of about 20 cents.
The report was Intel’s second since Lip-Bu Tan took over as CEO in March, promising to make the chipmaker’s products competitive again, and to reduce bureaucracy and layers of management, including slashing staff in Oregon and California.
In a memo to employees published on Thursday, Tan said that the first few months of his tenure had “not been easy.” He said that the company had “completed the majority” of its planned layoffs, amounting to 15% of the workforce, and that it plans to end the year with 75,000 employees. Intel previously said it was trying to reduce operating expenses by $17 billion in 2025.
Intel shares are up about 13% this year as of Thursday’s close after plummeting 60% in 2024, their worst year on record.
Tan also announced several other spending cuts in the memo, particularly in the company’s costly foundry division, which makes chips for other companies and is still looking for a big customer to anchor the business.
Intel said its foundry business had an operating loss of $3.17 billion on $4.4 billion in revenue.
Tan said that Intel had cancelled planned fab projects in Germany and Poland, and will consolidate its testing and assembly operations in Vietnam and Malaysia. He added that the company would slow down the pace of its construction of a cutting-edge chip factory in Ohio, depending on market demand and if it can secure big customers for the facility.
“Over the past several years, the company invested too much, too soon – without adequate demand,” Tan wrote. “In the process, our factory footprint became needlessly fragmented and underutilized.”
Tan wrote that the company’s forthcoming chip manufacturing process, called 14A, will be built out based on confirmed customer commitments.
“There are no more blank checks. Every investment must make economic sense,” Tan wrote.
The company’s client computing group, which is primarily comprised of sales of central processors for PCs, had $7.9 billion in sales, down 3% on an annual basis.
Revenue in the data center group, which includes some AI chips but is mostly central processors for servers, rose 4% to $3.9 billion. Tan wrote in his memo that Intel wants to regain market share in data center chips, and is looking for a permanent leader for the business. Longtime rival Advanced Micro Devices has increasingly been winning server business from cloud customers.
Tan added he would personally review and approve all chip designs before they are taped out, which is the final step of the design process before a new chip is manufactured.