In response to @ ssgbryan: “That being said - if Taffi (Daz's parent company) goes bellyup, other possibilities may emerge....They banked with Silicon Valley Bank.  If you are unaware, Peter Thiel apparently caused a bank run, and the FDIC had to take it over Friday.  Taffi apparently has no access to money right now, and depending on how this is handled on Mon, there is a chance they won't be able to make payroll.”

According to the information DAZ published, they used SVB to process credit card transactions. Ssgbryan may have more insight than I, but I haven’t seen anything to suggest that DAZ had uninsured deposits at SVB. Rather, DAZ is appealing to customers to use PayPal instead of credit cards to buy stuff. It’s ironic that Peter Thiel’s Venture Capitalist fund triggered the SVB run and evidently attempted to shift online purchases to PayPal—the platform he developed. I’m not suggesting the two are related—rather it merely shows how wealthy venture capitalist firms exploit small business concerns. No surprise there.

As for PayPal, years ago when it first emerged, I subscribed to a UK based monthly anthropology newsletter that only took PayPal payment: one USD a month. At some point, the newsletter dropped off the grid. Yet, PayPal continued to charge me for a no longer existent subscription. Its (so-called) customer service was entirely computer-based. There was no way to talk to a real person. Eventually I merely cancelled my PayPal subscription to stop the monthly charges—and PayPal still owes me USD 8.02 plus interest.

Your PayPal experience may differ but being my company’s senior compliance manager with a focus on ethical conduct and personal and corporate integrity, I’ll never use PayPal again. Yet I find it interesting, albeit not surprising, that the guy who founded PayPal triggered the SVB run.