PayPal’s 2025 Rally Miss: Why the Payments Giant Faces Another Weak Year Ahead
While digital assets soared, PayPal watched from the sidelines—and 2026 looks just as grim.
The Ghost of Rally Past
Remember 2025? Crypto markets went parabolic, with DeFi protocols and layer-1 networks printing fresh all-time highs. Traditional finance scrambled for exposure. PayPal, the supposed bridge, stayed anchored. Its crypto integration—once hailed as revolutionary—moved at the speed of a legacy bank transfer. Competitors ate its lunch, offering faster settlements, broader asset selection, and actual yield. PayPal offered a receipt.
The Innovation Gap Widens
The core issue isn't just a missed trade. It's structural. While fintech startups and even traditional banks built for a multi-chain future, PayPal's architecture creaked. Its user experience for crypto remained clunky, a bolted-on feature rather than a native function. Fees stayed stubbornly high—after all, someone has to pay for all those middle managers. The 'crypto' tab became a digital ghost town, visited only by the curious or the lost.
2026: The Year of Playing Catch-Up?
Don't hold your breath. The roadmap for the coming year reads like a list of apologies for last year's failures. Promises of 'enhanced wallet functionality' and 'exploring new blockchain integrations' are the corporate equivalent of 'the check is in the mail.' Meanwhile, the real innovation—institutional-grade DeFi, tokenized real-world assets, seamless cross-border rails—is happening elsewhere. PayPal is now in the unenviable position of trying to win back a user base that has already found better, cheaper, and faster alternatives. A classic case of moving a mountain with a teaspoon while everyone else is using dynamite.
In the end, PayPal's story is a cautionary tale for traditional finance dipping a toe in crypto waters: half-measures get you half the results. Or in this case, a spot on the bench during the biggest game in decades. Maybe they can write a press release about it.
Downgrades pile up for PayPal’s stock while retail investors loses hope
The hate online for PayPal has been nonstop. One trader on Reddit said they were down $20,000 and called it a “garbage stock,” just as Reddit sentiment score hit 12 out of 100, which frankly, that’s rock bottom. Another post blew up with 210 upvotes and 103 comments of people basically holding a support group for their losses.
The most viral post came from someone with $100,000 in the stock who wrote, “I’m down 20k on this garbage stock. Should I just sell everything and buy SPY puts? This thing is never going back up.” That guy was using 326% leverage, and the title of the post reads:- “PayPal lose, going to yolo everything.
The thing is, PayPal actually beat earnings eight out of the last nine quarters, but nobody cares since the stock keeps crashing, now down by 38% from $93.03, which was already far from its $231.38 high in 2021. The stock is now NEAR its 52-week low of $55.72.
Wall Street is tired too, as Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America have all downgraded PYPL going into 2026.
PayPal crashed 20% in the 2018 dip, 31% in the Covid crash, and then crashed over 83% when inflation hit. It’s been nothing but pain. And even now, it trades at 10 times forward earnings with 31% quarterly earnings growth, and the market still shrugs.
Jefferies isn’t feeling it either. They kept a Hold rating and slapped on a $60 target. Right now, it trades around $58.42. That’s barely above the bottom. They also warned about Germany, where PayPal gets about 20% of its branded payment volume and 25% of transaction margin dollars. Sales there are slowing down.
They’re now calling for just 2% TPV growth, down from 5% last quarter. Even with a P/E of 11.78 and a perfect Piotroski Score of 9, nobody’s buying the story. Price targets are all over the place, from $51 to $120, and earnings drop in 35 days.
Other Wall Street analysts are divided on where PayPal goes next. Of the 44 analysts covering PayPal, 20 rate it Buy, 20 rate it Hold, and four rate it Sell, according to FactSet.
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