The cryptocurrency craze is quickly going mainstream.
PayPal’s peer-to-peer payment service Venmo has started letting users to buy, sell and hold bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin and bitcoin cash, the next step in PayPal’s foray into digital assets.
But in some cases, investors might find more luck with indirect crypto plays than the currencies themselves, two traders told CNBC on Tuesday.
“In this case — the rush to the mining — it’s better to sell the picks and shovels than necessarily go for the mined asset,” Chantico Global founder and CEO Gina Sanchez said on “Trading Nation.”
PayPal, for one, will make “extraordinary fees” off Venmo’s move, said Sanchez, also chief market strategist at Lido Advisors.
“We own PayPal in our portfolio [at Lido Advisors]. We also own other chip names like Nvidia and Intel,” she said. “You need two things to mine bitcoin: you need very powerful computers and you need electricity. Electricity’s harder to play, but the chip shortage is easier.”
As businesses embrace digital assets, companies that help facilitate crypto transactions could also win out, Strategic Wealth Partners president and CEO Mark Tepper said in the same interview.
“Silvergate’s a bank … that works with all the crypto companies out there. Venmo’s allowing its users to access crypto through Paxos, which happens to be a Silvergate customer. So Silvergate’s going to benefit from this whole Venmo deal,” Tepper said.
“I really like them as a play and I think they’re actually going to benefit tremendously from what Venmo’s doing,” he said.
As for bitcoin itself, more hype will likely bring higher prices, Tepper said.
“What’s really going to drive bitcoin higher is more and more adoption,” he said. “If Amazon ever were to all of a sudden accept payments in bitcoin, I think bitcoin would shoot to over 100,000 overnight. So, yes, the more you see companies adopt and embrace it, I think the higher bitcoin goes.”
Disclosure: Lido Advisors owns shares of Nvidia and PayPal. Tepper owns shares of Silvergate Capital.
