While Apple Pay and Square might have a certain cultural chic, PayPal remains the undoubted king of the online payments block. The Facebook of transactions, if you will.

Now 18 years old, today we’re looking back at the venerable, and very powerful, pay master.

Growing Pays

PayPal was conceived back in 1998 as a payments service for Confinity, a company which developed security software for mobile devices.

In 2000 Confinity merged with Elon Musk’s X.com. The joint venture was eventually renamed PayPal in 2001.

One year later the company went public and quickly notched up US$61 million in revenue.

In June 2002 eBay snapped up the start-up for a cool US$1.5 billion.

Click for cash

There are now 180 million active PayPal accounts, each one of these makes around 27 transactions a year.

Over a typical year 4 billion payments are made through the service, a quarter of these on mobile.

Monopoly man?

One third of all US e-commerce transactions now happen on PayPal. However its reach stretches far around the globe.

PayPal is available in 203 markets and 100 currencies.

Greed is good

More than 1 million merchants currently use PayPal OneTouch, the company’s mobile payments service.

Over a typical week PayPal OneTouch processes 1.5 million payments.