Today the OpenID Foundation announced that joined the board of the OpenID Foundation as the sixth sustaining corporate member. This is certainly a very remarkable addition to the board as PayPal is a well-established brand all over the world and represents an industry that is not part of the board yet and which deals with very critical data, i.e. personal and financial data. So the addition of PayPal might be a signal for other companies and industries to try and implement OpenID.
However it is still unknown if and how PayPal will implement or support OpenID. There is no press release by the company so far, at least none that I am aware of. Will it become an OpenID Provider or a Reyling Party? Or maybe both? I’d like to see PayPal becoming a Relying Party which makes use of the recently finalized and approved Provider Authentication Policy Extension. I think this could be a real test for the extension and it forced more providers to push their security efforts. Though currently, this is just speculation.