Pivoting from macroeconomic concerns to capturing wallet share, PayPal is making an aggressive play to dominate checkout lanes. PayPal’s own footprint edged higher as active accounts rose 4% from the March quarter to 438 million. PayPal’s installment payment portfolio again grew more than the core business. “In the second quarter, BNPL volume grew more than 20% and monthly active accounts climbed 18%,” CEO Alex Chriss said. He added that average order values using BNPL run “more than 80% higher” than a standard branded checkout transaction, a statistic the company is using to recruit merchants who already accept PayPal but have yet to surface its installment options early in the shopping journey. For merchants, the pitch is that PayPal’s know your customer (KYC) infrastructure and access to “the largest ecosystem of payment-ready wallets” will simplify compliance when bots, not humans, initiate transactions. Debit card TPV across PayPal and Venmo grew more than 60% while monthly active accounts grew more than 65%, Chriss said. Two million users tapped a PayPal or Venmo debit card for the first time in the quarter, reinforcing Chriss’s thesis that cardholders transact more often and choose PayPal at checkout six times as frequently as non-card users. PayPal added yield rewards for holding PYUSD, expanded issuance to the Stellar and Arbitrum blockchains and said PYUSD would power PayPal World transactions that settle in local currency on the back end. The company also announced “Pay with Crypto,” earlier this week, which will convert more than 1,100 cryptocurrencies into PYUSD or fiat at checkout. Chriss said it positions PayPal as processor, not custodian. PayPal reported second-quarter net revenue of $8.29 billion, up 6% from the March quarter’s $7.79 billion and 5% year over year. Total payment volume rose by the same sequential 6% to $443.5 billion. Active accounts inched up to 438 million, reversing last year’s attrition but still growing more slowly than volume. Transaction margin dollars, a company metric that strips out operating costs, increased 7% year over year to $3.84 billion, or 8% when interest on customer balances is excluded. Non-GAAP earnings per share climbed 18%. Management again raised full-year guidance for both transaction‑margin dollars and earnings per share, even while acknowledging an “uneven” consumer backdrop in some corridors. The absence of dire macro commentary was itself a signal: PayPal believes its checkout strategy, not the economic cycle, will determine whether it can accelerate growth.