PayPal has just announced that it has reached over 100 million active accounts.  Along with delivering that news, PayPal’s president Scott Thompson also provided a rather bold prediction: by 2015, in the USA, the wallet will be a thing of the past.
“As the trend toward digital currency continues to gain momentum, we are focused on delivering solutions that are not just new and different, but better than what is currently the norm today,” Thompson wrote in a blog post.
“We believe that by 2015 digital currency will be accepted everywhere in the US – from your local corner store to Wal-Mart.  We will no longer need to carry a wallet.”
To forward this idea, PayPal is launching a new digital currency challenge, asking five US Bay Area residents to use nothing but digital currency for all of their purchases; no cash payments allowed.  They will use the challenge as a means of promotion, potentially providing the company with a good marketing tool.
In recent years, PayPal has surpassed its sister company eBay in total revenues and profits and the company is expected to serve as a platform for over $3 billion USD in mobile transactions this year.
This digital payment challenge issued by PayPal comes in the wake of Google’s own mobile payment trails, which see users in three US cities trialling payment by smartphone.  PayPal is also in the process of suing Google; saying that two of its former employees stole and shared trade secrets when they left PayPal for Google.