On a US public holiday, he preferred to sit at home on his computer to write the code, which is now worth billions: Pierre Omidyar went live with the online marketplace AuctionWeb in the mid-1990s, an early forerunner of the internet giant eBay.
After the company enjoyed initial success and later emerged as one of the few survivors of the dot-com bubble, eBay has become one of the most popular online marketplaces around.
Today in Germany a trading card is bought every eleven seconds on eBay, video games or consoles at the same rate. A vehicle part is even purchased every second.
But the generally tense market situation also made itself felt at the online giant: Since the beginning of the year, the company’s shares have had to cope with a price drop of around 30 percent.
eBay on crypto course
As a veteran of the e-commerce sector, eBay is daring more and more steps into the crypto space. However, the first contact with Bitcoin and Co. was not under a lucky star: in 2018 there are said to have been several advertisements on the platform that offered to sell cryptocurrencies – without any license.
In the meantime, however, the Internet company is trying to consciously advance into the crypto space. Just last year, the online marketplace announced that it would support trading in NFTs. Whether it’s physical or digital, they want to ensure they continue to be “the go-to place for collectors of all kinds,” said Jordan Sweetnam, eBay’s senior vice president for the North American market.
In the meantime, the founding father of online trading as we know it today has achieved further milestones in relation to the crypto industry. You can read how eBay is doing in the crypto space and what the internet giant might be up to in the current issue of BTC-ECHO Magazine.
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The BTC-ECHO Magazin is the leading German-language magazine since 2014 on the topics of Bitcoin, Blockchain, NFTs & cryptocurrencies.
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