Venmo Unveils Crypto Price Alert Tool

Venmo has rolled out a feature that lets customers set price alerts for the four cryptocurrencies on its platform.

As the company announced on Friday (Nov. 12), the feature lets users track the prices of bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash, all of which are available to buy, sell or hold. It gives customers alerts when the price of these currencies rises or falls by 5% or 10%.

The feature will be available for all eligible customers in the coming week, according to the report.

Venmo began offering users the ability to buy and sell crypto in April. The company said at the time that its 2020 customer behavior study showed that more than 30% of Venmo users were already using crypto or equities, with 20% of those customers starting to do so during the COVID pandemic.

Read more: Venmo Users Can Now Buy, Sell and Hold Cryptocurrency

Customers can enable price alerts by navigating to the crypto homepage from the bottom of the Venmo app, picking the cryptocurrency they want to track and toggling the button next to “price alerts.” From there, users can customize the alerts they want to receive.

If they choose to get price alerts, users will get a maximum of two notifications when the price moves in a single direction within a 24-hour window for any cryptocurrency.

Customers can also set up alerts by picking the opt-in option when buying the four cryptos on Venmo, by clicking the box on the “Review and Buy” page or by toggling “crypto price alerts” in the push notification settings.

Read more: PayPal, Crypto and the Continued Super App Evolution

Earlier this week, PayPal, which owns Venmo, reported that the app has driven a 15% increase in customers transacting using cryptocurrencies.

The company reported that Venmo volumed surged 36% year over year to $60 billion, with the platform on track to reach a $240 billion run rate in total payment volumes – which is the same as PayPal’s entire American franchise in 2016.

Speaking to analysts on Monday (Nov. 8), PayPal CEO Dan Schulman went into more detail on cryptocurrencies. “Our strongest week ever for first-time users was last week,” he said. “And we’ve had strong weeks for first-time user growth. But clearly, the new app is driving both discoverability and conversion on the crypto side.”