PayPal (PYPL) will let its business clients buy, hold and sell cryptocurrency directly from their accounts in the U.S., potentially opening up a larger market for the payments giant.

After letting its retail users do the same via PayPal and Venmo accounts for several years now, the company also saw demand from business owners to buy, hold and sell crypto, the company said Wednesday.

"Business owners have increasingly expressed a desire for the same cryptocurrency capabilities available to consumers," said Jose Fernandez da Ponte, senior vice president of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and digital currencies at PayPal in a statement.

The payments company will also allow U.S. merchants to externally transfer cryptocurrency on-chain to "eligible" third-party wallets, according to the statement.

To start, the service will be unavailable to business clients in New York State, the company said, without giving a timetable for when that would change. The company is one of the 20 or so recipients of the Empire State's notoriously stringent BitLicense. It also has a trust license from the state's Department of Financial Services.

Since 2020, PayPal has allowed consumers to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrencies directly from their accounts. Last year, it unveiled its U.S. dollar-denominated stablecoin, PayPal USD (PYUSD), which reached a $1 billion market cap this summer.

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Aoyon Ashraf

Aoyon Ashraf is CoinDesk's managing editor for Breaking News. He spent almost a decade at Bloomberg covering equities, commodities and tech. Prior to that, he spent several years on the sellside, financing small-cap companies. Aoyon graduated from University of Toronto with a degree in mining engineering. He holds ETH and BTC, as well as ALGO, ADA, SOL, OP and some other altcoins which are below CoinDesk's disclosure threshold of $1,000.