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PayPal is giving its employees a cryptographic token economics course.
The company has launched an internal incentive platform for employee blockchains, Cheddar has learned. The initiative was carried out for a period of six months by about 25 people in the innovation workshop of PayPal ($ PYPL) San Jose and launched in mid-November, according to Michael Todasco, director of innovation.
Employees can access their tokens through the company's internal website and continue to earn more by participating in programs related to innovation and contributing ideas. Tokens, which do not hold any value outside the walls of PayPal, are also negotiable among employees with each transaction sent to, in effect, a "public ledger".
Historically, PayPal has maintained a firm position against the use of Bitcoin payments, in particular due to its broad base of commercial customers. If a small business accepts a Bitcoin payment and the volatile cryptocurrency price falls 30 percent, the same applies to the trader's profit.
In August 2016, PayPal filed a patent for an accelerated virtual currency transaction system that became public in March. A company spokesman declined to comment on the filing, claiming that patent deposits do not necessarily indicate their product plans.
PayPal tokens are redeemable for more than 100 "experiences" on the platform, including poker tournaments with a couple of their vice presidents, a run and coffee with CFO John Rainey and morning martial arts with CEO Dan Schulman. Gabrielle Scheibe Rabinovitch, the head of company investor relations, offered to let the employees borrow her dog for a day, Todasco said.
Todasco described it as a "Venmo type feed that people can appreciate and comment on and see all the ongoing activities of PayPal related to innovation".
The experiment is similar to that conducted by the Spanish bank BBVA, whose 4,000 employees in Spain and Argentina have access to a "BBVA Campus Wallet". The bank provides tokens to employees who can redeem them for an hour of training; they can also earn tokens if they train another employee. As a regulated financial institution, BBVA can not hold cryptographic assets, despite their proven interest.
PayPal's San Jose innovation lab is three years old; it also has innovation workshops in Singapore, Bangalore, Chennai and Scottsdale, Arizona. Although prototyping is the main goal, Todasco has stated that employees are committed to learning to work with new platforms so that they can take it into the business ー provided there is a business case for it.
For example, one of the first things the lab studied was vocal technology. Now PayPal has dedicated voice teams and works with the teachings, the code base and some of the people who came out of the exploration lab of the innovation lab. The laboratory itself no longer works on those projects, said Todasco.
(Disclosure: PayPal is one of Cheddar's sponsors but has had no editorial influence on this story.)
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