He preferred to sit at home at his computer on a US holiday to write the code, which is now worth billions: Pierre Omidyar went live in the mid-nineties with the online marketplace AuctionWeb, an early forerunner of the Internet giant eBay.
After the company had its first successes and later emerged as one of the few survivors of the dotcom bubble, eBay is now one of the most popular online marketplaces of all.
Today, in Germany, a trading card is bought every eleven seconds via eBay, video games or consoles in the same rhythm. A vehicle part is even purchased every second.
But the generally tense market situation also made itself felt by the online giant: since the beginning of the year, the company’s shares had to cope with a price discount of about 30 percent.
eBay is on a crypto course
As a veteran of the e-commerce sector, eBay is venturing more and more steps into the crypto space. However, the first contact with Bitcoin and Co. was not under a good star: in 2018, there are said to have been several ads on the platform that offered the sale of cryptocurrencies – without any license.
In the meantime, however, the Internet company is making efforts to consciously move forward into the crypto space. Just last year, the online marketplace announced that it would support trading with NFTs. Whether physical or digital, they want to ensure that they will continue to be “the go-to place for collectors of all kinds” in the future, said Jordan Sweetnam, senior vice president for the North American market at eBay.
Meanwhile, the founding father of online trading as we know him today has been able to record further milestones in relation to the crypto industry. You can read how eBay is doing in the crypto space and what the Internet giant could be up to in the current issue of BTC-ECHO magazine.
