Earlier this year, payments giant PayPal announced that it would allow U.S. users to purchase over 110 cryptocurrencies from their existing PayPal accounts through a new partnership with MoonPay, a Miami-based Web3 firm that serves more than 20 million users worldwide.

This past X, MoonPay extended that offering to Europe and the U.K. in order to "lower the barriers to entry," and bring "convenience and trust" to more customers, according to MoonPay CEO and co-founder Ivan Soto-Wright.

PayPal remains the top payment method in the U.S. after Apple Pay and bank payments, and its deepening push into crypto signals greater mainstream adoption of digital assets. TheStreet Crypto recently spoke to MoonPay's CEO Soto-Wright about the rollout of these efforts.

TheStreet Crypto: Can you discuss which hurdles MoonPay is removing for PayPal customers eager to wade into crypto?

MoonPay: For existing PayPal users, we are providing a gateway through MoonPay to hundreds of partners including some of the ecosystem’s largest wallets and decentralized applications we are integrated with directly.

We are providing a passport-like experience for users and saving them the burden of the manual process of re-entering identity and payment credentials when buying or selling crypto through MoonPay. Further, we’re enabling PayPal users to buy and sell 110+ different tokens, offering a wider range of options.

Our job is to blur the lines between fintech and crypto in terms of the user experience. We have succeeded when it is indistinguishable.

Before MoonPay’s partnership with PayPal, PayPal customers couldn’t buy Solana, Tether, or Dogecoin on PayPal. How does increased access to cryptocurrencies help PayPal customers?

We’re offering even more variety and choice when it comes to the tokens PayPal users can buy or sell. Now MoonPay users in the U.S. can buy and sell over 110 different cryptocurrencies with their PayPal Balance, direct bank withdrawal, or debit card.

Can you walk us through how this integration works? Do PayPal users need to set up a MoonPay account, or will they be able to access the expanded crypto offerings from within their PayPal account?

With this new integration, MoonPay added PayPal as a supported payment method for users to buy and sell crypto within the MoonPay ecosystem. Now, the 426 million active PayPal accounts can use their PayPal Balance, direct bank withdrawal, or debit card to frictionlessly top up their wallets via MoonPay.

While we launched exclusively on MoonPay’s mobile and web experiences, we are already rolling out the PayPal integration to many of our 500+ partners - including xPortal and Changelly which went live last week as well.

Why is it so important to bring fiat-to-cryptocurrency transactions to a mainstream audience?

Our belief is that the future of money is crypto. Cryptocurrencies offer decentralization and user control that allow people to take ownership of their money, data, identity, and other digital assets. Fiat-to-crypto transactions help new users access and participate in the ecosystem which fuels the growth of the crypto economy unlocking new use cases, financial products, and business models.

What we witnessed happening to telecoms is now happening in financial services – you once had expensive systems placing long distance phone calls, and now almost everything happens via a Voice over Internet Protocol in a much faster, cheaper way. The same thing will happen with financial services. Instead of legacy infrastructure systems that don't communicate in the same language, we can now move to a system built on the blockchain where transaction costs will eventually tend toward zero.