Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest dumps PayPal favoring Bitcoin-friendly Cash App

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Cryp­to invest­ment com­pa­ny Ark Invest founder, Cathie Wood, has dumped all of the firm’s hold­ings of Pay­Pal and showed greater con­fi­dence in the long-term growth of the Cash App pay­ment sys­tem which uses the Bit­coin Light­ning Network.

Wood explained her firm’s move at the Mia­mi Bit­coin 2022 con­fer­ence which wrapped up on April 9. 

The Light­ning Net­work (LN) is a layer‑2 solu­tion for Bit­coin meant to facil­i­tate faster and cheap­er trans­ac­tions. Finan­cial tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny Pay­Pal oper­ates the pay­ment app Ven­mo as a direct com­peti­tor with Block’s (for­mer­ly Square) Cash App. 

Wood said in an inter­view with CNBC on April 8 that she made the deci­sion to drop Pay­Pal for Cash App due to its more com­pre­hen­sive approach toward dig­i­tal asset wal­let inte­gra­tion. She said that although Ven­mo has begun to accom­mo­date Bit­coin (BTC), “it’s more of a fol­low­er of Cash App.”

“We tend to put our bets with who we believe will be the win­ners… As we con­sol­i­dat­ed our port­fo­lios dur­ing a risk-off peri­od, we chose Block over PayPal.”

Wood con­tin­ued that her firm’s con­vic­tion in Cash App stems from what she per­ceives to be the organ­i­cal­ly-dri­ven growth in users “as opposed to more of a top-down approach” from Venmo. 

In gen­er­al, Wood believes retail investors have dri­ven the cryp­to mar­ket up to this point as she stated:

“I don’t think most insti­tu­tion­al investors are posi­tioned the way they ulti­mate­ly will be. Retail has real­ly led the charge here.”

Ven­mo cur­rent­ly boasts 70 mil­lion users and $850 mil­lion in prof­it com­pared to Cash App’s 44 mil­lion and $2.03 bil­lion in prof­it in 2021 accord­ing to data from app track­er Busi­ness of Apps. The stark con­trast in their abil­i­ty to net prof­its could be anoth­er moti­vat­ing fac­tor for Ark’s assess­ment of the two brands.

Relat­ed: Bit­coin plumbs April lows as US dol­lar strength hits high­est since May 2020

As Ark Invest has tak­en a bull­ish stance on Cash App, its Bit­coin prod­uct lead Miles Suter announced on April 7 that Amer­i­can users would be able to auto­mat­i­cal­ly invest a por­tion of their direct deposits into Bitcoin.

Wood is a big Bit­coin believ­er who repeat­ed her pre­dic­tion in the inter­view that BTC would hit $1 mil­lion by 2030.



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