Exclusive: Paxos to allow employees to be paid in USDG

Paxos is rolling out the ability for employees to receive part of their salaries in USDG due to a Toku integration, Blockworks has exclusively learned. 

The integration will utilize the same payroll platforms — ADP and Workday — but allows employees to receive USDG straight to their wallets. 

For employees who opt to receive USDG, the settlement, unlike with traditional paychecks, will be immediate. There won’t be a waiting period to receive the stablecoin. 

“By adopting USDG payroll for our team, Paxos is showing the most direct path for users to access and experience USDG in everyday life. As more companies plug into Toku’s payroll rails, USDG becomes accessible to thousands of employees globally, right at the source of their income,” Paxos noted in a press release. 

Stablecoins are the biggest way that employees across the industry are being paid in crypto, per a Pantera survey conducted at the end of 2024. 

“USDC (63%) and USDT (28.6%) collectively account for over 90% of crypto salaries, cementing their status as the go-to choices for payroll stability and liquidity,” the report found.

For Toku, this move is the first step to opening up a new way for employees to be paid. 

Toku CEO Ken O’Friel told Blockworks that he wants to broaden the horizon for employees and make it so folks don’t have to receive a payment to a checking account, but instead can receive salaries “directly to where you want.”

He believes Paxos is just one of the first companies to implement this type of option for employees, but that we’ll start to see more companies — even traditional institutions — roll out this option as part of their payroll in the future. 

“People really discount how entrenched a lot of these enterprise software solutions are to the entire organization. And then there are people behind those tools that have been doing things a certain way for fifteen to twenty years [or] their whole career. And so forcing change on that in that big enterprise that’s resistant to change is really, really hard,” O’Friel noted. 

So Toku developed an API that works inside payroll software to “coordinate and orchestrate [receiving stablecoins] between the payroll provider and the company,” he explained.

O’Friel told Blockworks that this is the “gateway” to a broader adoption. The technology, he added, is finally ready in ways it wasn’t even four years ago. 

“From our standpoint, I think when you start being in that flow of funds, like, there’s a lot of optionality in terms of what you can do from a product standpoint, but we’re just really focused on getting the institutions on board. And so for us…we can also pay people and tokenized money market funds; it’s really anything. We can pay people in Bitcoin if they want, or any token we’re able to support. So it doesn’t just stop at stablecoins,” he said. 

Updated 10/23/2025 at 10:23 a.m. ET to reflect Toku’s software integrations.

---

Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

• The Breakdown: Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily.
• 0xResearch: Alpha in your inbox. Think like an analyst.
• Empire: Crypto news and analysis to start your day.
• Forward Guidance: The intersection of crypto, macro and policy.
• The Drop: Apps, games, memes and more.
• Lightspeed: All things Solana.
• Supply Shock: Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin.