The mobile payment industry is booming and the eBay company is at the center of it.

eBay was involved in two industry panels during CES that discussed the future of digital and mobile payment industries. The company was able to announce record mobile payment volume.

The Ebay Ink Blog was kind of enough to recap the panels that Ebay was involved with. The first panel was PayPal at “Mobile Payment Basics: How the Technology Works.” The title sounds like a boring introductory course, but it turned into a discussion on the pros and cons of the “wallet in the cloud” versus NFC solutions for mobile payments.

“We see the wallet in the cloud as the best way to bridge the gap between the online and offline world,” said David Marcus, VP/GM of Mobile for PayPal.

Andrew Paradise, CEO of Aislebuyer, agreed saying, “If I lose my iPhone, I don’t want to have to cancel all my credit cards. It would be no different than losing my wallet.”

Bill Gadja, Head of Mobile for Visa, was more in favor for NFC solutions, but said that “whatever technology we end up using, it’s all going to come down to the widespread education and adoption by the individual merchants.”

All at the panel agreed that 2012 may very well be the year of the digital wallet. Paypal used this to announce that their mobile payment volume had reached $4 billion, a huge increase from the original prediction of $1.5 billion.

The second panel, aptly named “Planet of the Apps,” included the eBay company proper with Steve Yankovich, VP of Ebay Mobile, speaking on the panel.

The panelists discussed trends in mobile apps in 2011, but Yankovich stressed the importance of QR codes in 2011. He predicts that the next big trend will be apps that utilize the camera on mobile devices.

Chris Hercik, Creative Director at Sports Illustrated, said that organizations need to adapt and react to shifts in consumer behavior. He presented the example of readers using the Sports Illustrated mobile app are asking for interactive ads instead of having to reject or be put off by them.

Yankovich went on to equate eBay to plumbing in that they only exist to connect the buyer to the seller.

eBay, like PayPal, did well in mobile in 2011 as well. The company’s global mobile gross merchandise volume reached $5 billion in 2011.