Cathie Woods, the founder and CEO of Ark Invest, the cryptocurrency investment company, announced during the Bitcoin 2022 Conference in Miami. The meetup, which ended on Saturday, gave the coin community the opportunity to network with project teams.
According to Woods, Ark took the decision to move all its investments from Paypal while advancing its stakes in CashApp because it is a more comprehensive coin payment platform.
CashApp is Ahead of Venmo
The announcement was also confirmed by the CashApp Product Lead, Miles Sunter, who wrote on Twitter that Ark Invest sold all their stakes in Paypal. Paypal’s Venmo is a direct competitor of CashApp. He emphasized that CashApp is ahead of Venmo in terms of integrated payments and its emphasis on Bitcoin payments.
“@ARKInvest has sold, completely got out of Paypal, whose Venmo is a big competitor to Cash App.
(Cash App has) much more conviction – especially when it comes to bitcoin.” pic.twitter.com/mUGkdWGMFX
— Miles Suter (@milessuter) April 10, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
In a CNBC interview on Friday, Woods said that the company had no qualms going for CashApp over Paypal. She maintained that the futuristic approach of the former gave it an edge in terms of cryptocurrency payments, adding that Venmo is more or less following in the strategies of CashApp.
She said that opting for CashApp over Paypal is a consolidation trade-off, premised on the company’s perception of who would win between Block (CashApp’s parent company) and Paypal. She stated that the growth of CashApp has shown signs of consistency that reflects the increasing interest in cryptocurrencies. This is unlike Venmo whose growth is far from being organic but mainly due to the influence of Paypal.
CashApp announced last week that it was integrating Lightning Network (LN), the Layer 2 solution on Bitcoin that enables faster and cheaper transactions.
Woods is of the opinion that the drivers of the crypto economy are the retail investors.
“I don’t think most institutional investors are positioned the way they ultimately will be. Retail has really led the charge here.”
At the moment, Venmo has 70 million users, compared with CashApp’s 44 million. It generated $850 million in profits in 2021, dwarfed by CashApp’s $2.03 billion.
It is possible that the motivating factor behind Ark Invest support for CashApp is the company’s ability to make profit.
