How to Buy Bitcoins With PayPal

Yes, it is possible to buy bitcoins with PayPal, this is the good news. The bad news is that none of the options listed below is elegant, cost-effective, and straightforward.

The simple reason why it’s difficult to buy bitcoin with PayPal is that a PayPal payment is reversible, and bitcoin payment is not. In other words, you can’t directly buy bitcoins using PayPal, because it is too risky for the seller. Best bitcoin exchanges do not allow funding through PayPal at all. This is largely due to repeated cases where someone pays for bitcoins with PayPal and receives cryptocurrency. But then fraudulently complains to PayPal or their credit card company that they never received the goods. All too often, PayPal agrees with the fraudulent buyer, and this is understandably too risky for bitcoin sellers.

As always, there is a workaround that you can use to buy bitcoins with PayPal, but it holds within some transaction fees.

Buy bitcoins with PayPal via Bitpanda

Deposit instantly and free with PayPal at Bitpanda.

Simply and free!

Buy bitcoins with PayPal via Paxful

Similar to LocalBitcoins is Paxful. It is a marketplace for buying bitcoins directly from other people. You pay sellers directly from your personal accounts.

The fee varies from a seller to a seller, and some of them charge as much as 25% for buying bitcoin with PayPal. However, this fee is dropping rapidly and you can find sellers with just a 1% charge. The positive side of this platform is, that even if this is people to people marketplace buyers you are 100% protected.

They verify and check all of the sellers for your safety. Pay with confidence, 2-factor, escrow, highest level encryption, and professionally audited security. Some of the sellers will require your ID for the first purchase or some other personal information, but you can also find sellers where no verification is needed.

Buy bitcoins with PayPal via PayPal debit card

Another indirect method is to use a PayPal debit card. It is more complicated and is suitable for those who are planning to make purchases more often.

This method allows you to use funds that are in your account but without using PayPal itself as your payment method. It is good because you do not need to worry about opening up accounts on third-party websites to buy bitcoin. You are only dealing with PayPal and whatever exchange you intend to use.

This method is only available to people who live in the USA. You generally need to have a business account to get a debit card from PayPal (also is if you have a personal account which has received a minimum of $500 within the last year).

Trading platform Cex.io, one of our favourite platforms, recommends this method, and it should also work on other sites which accept debit or credit card as a payment method to purchase bitcoin.

Buy bitcoins with PayPal via VirWox

UPDATE: This was the most popular way for a long, but not the easiest, though. The Virtual World Exchange (VirWoX) has permanently closed its business on January 6, 2020.

Using the VirWox, you can buy another currency, which is Second Life Lindens (SLL) with PayPal. Then convert your SLL to bitcoins. The reason this method works is that you do not buy bitcoins with PayPal directly, you only buy SLL with PayPal and then exchange your SLL to bitcoin. The whole process will cost around 6% in transaction fees altogether but will let you purchase bitcoins pretty quickly as opposed to a wire transfer. They do not accept payments from unverified PayPal accounts, and there is a limit on how many coins you can buy at once.

Related

  • eToro is a social trading platform, and lets you deposit via PayPal (but does not accept PayPal for US customers). Here you don’t get to buy actual bitcoins but still gain exposure to its price moves.
  • Although Paypal stated in the past, that bitcoin is the biggest scam in the history, this might change soon. Currently, we do not know when Paypal intends on launching crypto service or even what coins it will support, though its almost certain bitcoin will among the coins offered.
  • From time to time, you can purchase cloud mining with PayPal. During the duration of your contract you will receive bitcoins for your money with some extra profit (or loss). Eobot accepted PayPal payments in the past (currently they don’t), but please do note that this is a long-term investment and you can not get your bitcoins instantly this way.
  • If you want to sell your bitcoins to PayPal, check our bitcoin to PayPal guide.
  • Some users claim, that the best way to buy bitcoin with PayPal is that you simply withdraw money from your PayPal to bank account and then buy bitcoins with bank account. If you have a bank account and can withdraw PayPal funds, we suggest this option. If you can’t withdraw, the best options are listed above.
  • There are many scam exchangers, so please do not just buy bitcoins through the first link that appears in google.
  • From time to time, you may also buy bitcoins on forums, like bitcointalk.org or reddit from trusted forum members.
  • You may want to check also other options to buy bitcoins
How to Buy Bitcoins With PayPal was last modified: February 27th, 2024 by +Bitcoin

View Comments

  • Thanks for the update. We removed Bitcoin Insanity as they really do not offer this option anymore.

    • As far as we are aware, there are no other reliable sources to buy bitcoin with paypal. There are a few dodgy places, but we are not going to list them.

  • So, erm, what's the purpose of alternate currency if you cannot exchange or purchase it readily?? Also, a single bitcoin is inappropriately costly for nominal folks. $300 for a SINGLE BitCoin??? And ZERO recourse or liquidation options??

    This is a racket not unlike the Federal Reserve, IMO.

    • In view of the article, Virwox works well, I use it all the time. In view of Localbitcoins, the article is a touch mistaken saying it's only person to person, this implies that it has to be done face to face, which is incorrect, you can do online transactions AND meet face to face if you so wish.

  • yes they accept paypal.. i exchange almost everyday.. just follow the steps.. open and acct with virworx, deposit using paypal.. exchange ur surrency to SLL then from SLL to BTC.. send btc to your wallet.. thats it!

    • First, you will be charged to deposit money into your account from Skrill, that is about 0.39 Euro plus 3.5%. Then you will be charged 2.9%+ to buy SSL. Another 2.9%+ to convert it to bitcoin.
      And finally, 0.005 bitcoin when withdrawing, which is currently about 1$. Lets say you change 100$ - that will cost you roughly about 10$.

  • Hi everyone,
    I use Virwox and it's very good, my only problem is that I have a limit of 88 USD that I can deposit in my account. Can anyone help me and instruct me how to change that and be able to deposit more via paypal? Thanks in advance.