The small businesses I know have learned from bitter experience never ever to leave money in Paypal because it will seize it when it feels like and give it back whenever if ever. That does not sound like a business that relies on people leaving money in their account earning 0% for the depositor and a few percent / year for PayPal (large retailers run the same scam, where they always pay for goods 89 days after receipt and keep the money earning interest in the meantime).
That's consistent with the article, which says that
(a) a large part of PayPal's margin comes from convincing individual consumers, as opposed to businesses, to keep money at PayPal
and (b) that while it's tempting to assume the benefit from this is to keep the interest rate spread, the bigger deal is getting to keep transaction fees when a user next sends that money via PayPal but one side of the transaction is open to paying credit card interchange fees for it.
As far as I can tell I pay 0% and $0.00 to transfer from Paypal to my bank account (they added an instant transfer with a 1.75% fee as a sucker option). I thought that paragraph was about "aha, if they pay from buyer's paypal wallet A to seller's paypal wallet B, we can deduct our 3% plus 30 cent fee, but just do the transaction as a database update which costs us nothing"?
Losing your cryptos when a trusted intermediary steals them or loses them through incompetence (Quadriga CX) is so common that crypto fans invented their own name for it! (Rug pulling)
