Blockchain validation. Payments between different network layers. Recommendations for digital assets in the metaverse.
These are some of the areas where PayPal’s research and development efforts appear to be focused, according to a series of recently published patent applications.
The latest filing, published Thursday and originally filed in March 2022, goes into the details of how validators or miners should be selected during the process of adding transactions to the blockchain. The document states that the company’s disclosed techniques could “beneficially enable sending blockchain requests to a desired subset of miners/validators.”
Three other patent applications, released on September 21, were also filed in March 2022.
One of these supposedly offered new “methods and systems” to enable off-chain transactions via NFT marketplaces.
Another mentions the concept of a so-called omniverse, which in this context suggests a product that trades in multiple metaverses. PayPal says it has developed an “online transaction processor” that would make recommendations for which digital assets a user should purchase based on the user’s blockchain preferences and which metaverses they interact with most.
A third describes another conceptual online transaction processor. The purpose of this processor is to facilitate payments between users and merchants operating on different network layers (layer-1 and layer-2) in a more efficient manner.
In short, the applications offer a glimpse into PayPal’s thinking as it builds out its suite of crypto products and services.
For example, when PayPal released a stablecoin in August, these proposals provide insight into the direction of PayPal’s use of the technology for payments. Venmo, the company’s popular payment app that enabled crypto transfers in May.
PayPal did not immediately respond to Blockworks’ request for comment.