PAYPAL BITCOIN RESERVES

What is this page?

PayPal is one of the places people buy and sell Bitcoin, and while your coins sit there the exchange holds them in wallets of its own. Watching those wallets is one of the oldest reads in the market. Coins arriving usually means someone is getting ready to sell, and coins leaving usually means someone has decided to hold on to them instead.

Where do these numbers come from?

Nothing here is bought in. Where a public source has named an address as PayPal's, Maketo adds up what sits on it today, straight from the chain. So the naming comes from outside and the counting is entirely ours, and each day's figure follows the coins rather than anything the company reports. Maketo also looks for PayPal's coins a second way, by grouping addresses that spend together, and what that finds is on PayPal's reserves page.

What happens when a reading is missing?

Read it as a floor and never as a total. It counts the addresses that have been named and no others, so PayPal may hold a great deal more in wallets nobody has named yet, and coins moved to an unnamed address read here as coins leaving. The number says what we can see, which is a different thing from what the company holds.

How far back does this go?

Maketo does not record PayPal's trading, so there is no open interest, funding or order book on this page. That is a limit of what we listen to rather than something the exchange withholds, and the page leaves the space empty rather than filling it with someone else's number.