PayPal’s stablecoin goes live on Solana

The payments firm is exploring PYUSD’s payments use cases

May 29, 2024 09:00 am

CryptoFX/Shutterstock and Adobe modified by Blockworks

PYUSD, the stablecoin launched by PayPal, has become available on Solana.

Users can onramp PayPal’s stablecoin to Solana using Crypto.com, Phantom and Paxos, which is also the issuer of PYUSD.

Jose Fernandez da Ponte, PayPal’s senior vice president of blockchain, crypto and digital currencies, told Blockworks in an interview that the payments giant is interested in Solana’s potential for enabling payments and peer-to-peer money movements with PYUSD, as opposed to the popular stablecoin use case of trading, for instance.

PYUSD debuted in August as an Ethereum-based stablecoin backed 1:1 with assets including dollars and US Treasurys.

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Sheraz Shere, general manager of payments at the Solana Foundation, told Blockworks that it’s common for projects to deploy on Ethereum mainnet, but once “there’s a desire to figure out how to scale [the assets] and have them work in a multitude of use cases, we see people coming on Solana.”

Shere noted that Visa took a similar path when it launched its stablecoin settlement program on Ethereum before adding Solana capability.

Relative to Ethereum, Solana boasts cheaper transaction fees and higher throughput, making the chain potentially more efficient for payments.

There are no new products being announced with the Solana launch, but the firm has already started exploring PYUSD’s payments use cases. PayPal’s cross-border payments service Xoom lets users transfer PYUSD for things like remittances.

Still, PYUSD is relatively small as far as its usage in the stablecoin sector.

PYUSD ranks as the 13th-largest stablecoin by market capitalization, per CoinGecko. It’s entering a market dominated by two incumbents. Roughly 97% of Solana stablecoin activity is currently accounted for by USDT and USDC, per DeFiLlama.

PayPal is playing the long game when it comes to crypto adoption, its crypto and blockchain SVP says.

“We are probably in year four of a 10-year process,” Fernandez da Ponte said of PayPal’s crypto plans.

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