"The systems and methods of the present disclosure practically eliminate the amount of time the payee must wait to be sure they will receive a virtual currency payment in a virtual currency transaction by transferring to the payee private keys that are included in virtual currency wallets that are associated with predefined amounts of virtual currency that equal a payment amount identified in the virtual currency transaction."
It echos some of the concepts outlined by Microsoft last month (link). It's becoming a widely accepted idea, that transactions must be confirmed off of the blockchain, then recorded to the blockchain afterwards - otherwise there's no way Bitcoin which is currently processing a maximum of about 7 transactions per second, will ever rival credit cards as a payment system which can do about 50,000 per second. Lightening Network is a similar off-chain solution.
But also worth noting - a patent filing doesn't necessary mean a company is about to dive into cryptocurrencies head first. PayPal has not announced any specific product or service related to cryptocurrency coming soon.
You can read PayPal's full patent application here.
Author: Adam Lee
Asia News Desk
