Share this article

PayPal Makes Retail Stablecoin Play with PYUSD on Solana

The asset comes with Token Extensions that give it compliance superpowers.

Updated May 29, 2024, 4:59 p.m. Published May 29, 2024, 1:00 p.m.
A large PayPal logo is on display outside its corporate HQ (Shutterstock)
PAYPAL Headquarters (Shutterstock)

Payments giant PayPal’s (PYPL) stablecoin PYUSD is coming to Solana almost a year after first debuting on the Ethereum blockchain.

The launch could bring new interest to a modestly sized crypto asset that hasn’t caught fire despite its name-brand backing. PYUSD has around 8,600 holders on the Ethereum blockchain and a market cap of a tick under $400 million—tiny compared to the largesse of its competitors from Circle and Tether, crypto-native firms.

STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Don't miss another story.Subscribe to the Crypto Daybook Americas Newsletter today. See all newsletters

“Ethereum works well enough,” said PayPal's Senior Vice President of Blockchain, Jose Fernandez da Ponte. "But if you’re interested in retail payments as we are, basically you need at least 1000 transactions per second, and you need transaction costs in the pennies, not in the dollars."

Beyond cost and speed PYUSD also has new superpowers on Solana that weren't possible on Ethereum. It uses this chain's "Token Extensions'' standards to let merchants make their transfers a little more confidential, for example. It one of a handful of compliance and programmability powers for PYUSD.

CORRECTION (May 29, 13:26 UTC): Corrects market cap of PYUSD to $400 million from $400,000.


More For You

Protocol Research: GoPlus Security

GP Basic Image

What to know:

  • As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
  • GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
  • Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.

More For You

Crypto’s Machine Learning ‘iPhone Moment’ Comes Closer as AI Agents Trade the Market

Robot girl (Gabriele Malaspina, Unsplash)

Recall Labs, a firm that has run 20 or so AI trading arenas, pitted foundational large language models (LLMs) against customized trading agents.

What to know:

  • Specially customized AI trading tools outperformed LLMs such as GPT-5, DeepSeek and Gemini Pro.
  • Rather than simply using profit and loss to measure success, AI agents balance risk and reward when faced with a multitude of market conditions.
  • As in TradFi, hedge funds and family offices with the resources to invest in the development of custom AI trading tools will be first to reap the rewards.