Venmo-ing crypto is already here — the latest development in PayPal's nearly one-year-old service enabling on-chain transfers.

Why it matters: It's an incremental advance in the payment giant's vision of a more cashless future, one that includes solving what it sees as some of the roadblocks keeping crypto from playing a more significant role in payments, Crystal writes.

What they're saying: "We want to cement the position of PayPal as this conduit between the fiat and web3 world in an integrated way," Jose Fernandez da Ponte, head of PayPal's blockchain team, tells Axios.

• Unlike crypto, PayPal's issue is not of scale. Rather, da Ponte pointed to the opportunity of creating "network effects" by combining more than 400 million account holders and the roughly 100 million global crypto wallets.

Between the lines: He thinks stablecoins could do more.

• The dominant stablecoins on the market, da Ponte says, "tend to focus on one part of the payment component" — that is moving value from one person to another.
• "But for stablecoins to crack payments, you need to address the concept of a settlement of a contract."
• "I bought something from you, but it's not what I asked for — a merchant needs to be able to reconcile that and to connect that to [their] financial systems," he says.

What's next: Da Ponte has previously said PayPal is interested in its own stablecoin — a concentrated market that could perhaps have room for one more, once the regulatory storm clears.

• "We have and continue to be looking at stablecoins," he says. "We're exploring that space."
• "If and when we decide to do something, obviously, it would be under coverage by regulators, but it's a space that we believe is fundamentally important for the industry."

Catch up fast: PayPal started with a feature that allowed the buying and selling of bitcoin, ethereum, bitcoin cash and litecoin in October 2020, but its most "significant milestone" was the enabling of on-chain transfers last year.

• How it works: One could send crypto in a PayPal wallet outside or vice versa.
• "Before that it was a walled experience — you could buy and sell through PayPal, but you couldn't move it around," he said. That now extends to Venmo as of a few weeks ago.
• It also is involved in CBDC projects.

Zoom out: So far folks on PayPal aren't clamoring to use bitcoin and ether to pay for things — "people tend not to see it as a currency yet."

• Merchants haven't wanted to accept it for "its volatility and the complexity of holding it." In response, PayPal in 2021 made it so that if someone wanted to pay with bitcoin or ether, the company stepped in between so that the customer could pay in bitcoin while the merchant received fiat.

Yes, but: Crypto isn't exactly the holy grail for all payments firms.

What's next: Da Ponte has his eye on solving other needs, like companies that want to pay other businesses they work with in crypto.

• Or say, allowing a consumer in South Africa to pay for a product from a merchant in the U.K. without an internationally enabled credit card.

The bottom line: Da Ponte thinks all of payments will inevitably go digital, eventually, and the competition in payments is getting more interesting with the Federal Reserve's own near-instant FedNow service set to roll out soon.

The longevity of some coins has nothing to do with their usefulness, but the staying power of the joke, Crystal writes.

Zoom in: DOGE is the leader in that respect, the biggest in terms of market capitalization, according to CoinGecko, and the most liquid across crypto exchanges, per Kaiko.

Of note: PEPE has been leapfrogging others recently as its popularity soared.

• Its liquidity rivals that of SHIB, a much older Meme coin, even though its market capitalization of around $600 million remains a fraction of SHIB's $5 billion.

A top U.S. financial regulator is poised to go to battle with another set of crypto firms, Crystal writes.

Driving the news: Digital Currency Group unit Genesis Global Capital, along with crypto exchange Gemini, asked the court Friday night to dismiss the SEC's complaint against it, court documents show.

Flashback: The SEC in January charged Genesis and Gemini with selling unregistered securities, pointing to the contract called a Master Digital Loan Agreement struck among lender Genesis, Gemini and customers in its yield-bearing Earn program.

What they're saying: Legal representation for Genesis argued "the SEC’s single claim — for a violation of Section 5 of the Securities Act of 1933 — is legally deficient because the Complaint fails to plead facts that would elevate the loan agreements into securities."

• Between the lines: "Sometimes, a loan is just a loan," they wrote.
• Gemini's legal counsel filed a motion in support of Genesis.

Of note: The SEC also sought a permanent injunction against both parties, that is that they be restrained from conducting the businesses that are allegedly violating federal securities laws. And that they give up any profits that they made doing so.

• Genesis' counsel is pushing back on that as well, saying the SEC has not alleged "any likelihood that the now-shuttered Gemini Earn program will restart" and so hasn't provided a basis for that restraint.

The bottom line: Between Genesis' bankruptcy proceeding and Gemini's customers being creditors in that, the SEC's ask would fly counter to what it wants to achieve, they argued.

• Monetary penalties would "come directly at the expense of GGC’s other creditors, including the same exact Gemini Earn customers the SEC has ostensibly brought this action to protect."

🪷 India-based crypto exchanges appear to be in dire straits. (CoinDesk)

💶 The European Central Bank published two reports looking at the feasibility of a digital euro. (The European Central Bank)

🪰 Singapore sovereign wealth fund Temasek conducted an internal review of its investment into FTX and those responsible took a pay cut. (Temasek)

#Mintthecoin is the battle cry of a policy meme not of your typical coin enthusiasts, but for economists and financial commentators, Crystal writes.

Context: Sean Tuffy is using stills from the movie "Finding Neverland" to poke fun at the news of a tentative budget deal that would "kick the can" on the debt ceiling.

Zoom in: The idea to mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin to fund the U.S. government would bypass the need for periodic debt ceiling negotiations.

• Of note: Its basis is a legal loophole that would allow the U.S. to mint platinum coins of any denomination the Treasury secretary chooses. (P.S. Janet Yellen was not a fan.)
• The proposition of such a thing emerged in 2011 and again during the crypto bull run of 2021, popularized by Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal.

How it works: If a coin were ever minted it would be locked away and the funds generated would go toward paying down the trillions in national debt.

The bottom line: It's not gonna happen.