According to the most attentive followers of eBay services and virtual currencies, the customer-to-customer platform makes probably not the first attempt to add “Virtual Currency” category to its listings.
As the IRS succeeded to classify Bitcoin and other virtual currencies, as well as released A&Q guidance for taxation purposes, eBay has the legislative right to add the new category.
All offers are divided in three sub-categories: currency, miners and mining contracts. The first group is still empty, but the customers can browse at least 116 mining offers and about 536 mining contracts (as on April 5th).
Advertisements from different merchants do not concentrate around Bitcoin, but feature other alternative currencies as Litecoin or Dogecoin.
The experts believe that this decision carries a long-term character as the eBay service is not acting as an exchanger requiring an MSB (money service business) license. Acting as a mediator eBay is not engaged in the cryptocurrency finance directly. The mentioned innovation has been announced in the April 2014 “Category Changes: Coins & Paper Money” report. It is too early to evaluate the success of the idea, but the amount of offers is definitely going to grow exponentially.