Today, we are excited to unveil the first Global PYUSD Portal Hackathon, a collaboration between PayPal and Portal, built on Solana.

The global virtual hackathon will start on August 12, 2024 and run until September 16, 2024. The winners of the hackathon will receive prizes from a total prize pool of 40,000 PYUSD and be showcased at the Solana Hacker House in Hong Kong from October 24 - 26, 2024.

Participants are also encouraged to continue building and be eligible for even more prizes by entering their projects to the Solana RADAR Hackathon, powered by Colosseum!

Apply for the Global PYUSD Portal Hackathon!

Hackathon Track and Prizes

The Global PYUSD Portal Hackathon will distribute 40,000 PYUSD in prizes to 6 hackathon winners:

• Grand Champion: 15,000 PYUSD

• Runner Up: 10,000 PYUSD

• Innovation Champion: 5,000 PYUSD

  • This prize goes to the team who creates the most novel project or proof of concept; the most fundamentally new application of PYUSD in the market.

• Popular Choice Award: 3,500 PYUSD

  • To be chosen by the fellow hackathon participants!

• “Consumer Knows Best”: 3,500 PYUSD

  • This prize goes to the top consumer application built during the hackathon.

• “Cha-ching!”: 3,500 PYUSD

  • This prize goes to the top DeFi / Trading application built during the hackathon.

Why Build with PYUSD on Solana?

The launch of PYUSD on Solana expands our efforts to make PYUSD the choice stablecoin for digital payments. On Solana, PYUSD can be transferred between web3 wallets through speedy and secure transactions with low-cost transfer fees. Whether on Solana or Ethereum, PYUSD can also be sent between your Venmo or PayPal wallet and your decentralized wallet, all with near-zero network fees.

For merchants and retail users alike, PYUSD on Solana comes with powerful features that Solana enables. These features allow for more nuanced ways to use stablecoins that reflect the type of customization that today’s web2 users are accustomed to in financial services:

• Confidential Transfers: allows merchants the option to maintain confidentiality of transaction amounts while maintaining visibility of other transaction details.

• Transfer Hooks: enables PayPal developers to invoke custom programs during token transfers for individuals and merchants using PYUSD. These hooks will enable an ecosystem of useful features that mirror today’s “plug-ins'' for commercial use.

• Memo Fields: enables senders and receivers to include information along with payments, creating a more user-friendly experience for daily payments and recordkeeping.

Explore more features of PYUSD on Solana in our announcement post and don’t miss out on the opportunity to join the Global PYUSD Portal Hackathon. Together, we can build the future of decentralized digital payments with PayPal’s PYUSD. Register here!

PayPal has over two decades of payments experience. In our earliest years, we shouldered the responsibility of not just facilitating payments, but also introducing and evangelizing a new technology — digital payments. This experience provides novel insights that allow us to refine our approach to the adoption of PYUSD; specifically, what we believe are the three phases that lead to mass adoption of any novel payments mechanism:

1. Awareness

2. Utility

3. Ubiquity

Awareness through Introduction

As we discussed in our inaugural post “Pay How You Want," we believe crypto provides an opportunity to innovate certain high-opportunity segments of today's payment rails. But such transformations don’t occur overnight. Payments are omnipresent and deeply entrenched by both habit and practice, so changes are gradual and steady. Introducing a new payment method is as much a behavioral transformation as it is a technological or financial one.

The first step in adoption is awareness — i.e. the task of simply introducing people to the fact that a new technology exists. In this phase, “early adopters” are the target audience — a group that makes up about 15% of the population.

Launching PYUSD specifically on Ethereum in late 2023 ensured this awareness phase among early adopters. By launching on the #2 blockchain in market cap and the largest, most active ecosystem among smart contract platforms, we let the world know, "PYUSD is here.” Moreover, PYUSD’s integration in the PayPal and Venmo apps introduced it to over 100 million US users. Further, exchanges, our institutional partners, and our on/off ramp partners helped expand PYUSD's reach outside the PayPal ecosystem.

We know from experience that getting a new payment mechanism into the hands and minds of people is a necessary first step — with an eye towards growing utility for long-term adoption.

Utility through Integration

The next step in the adoption of a new payments technology is utility. By utility, we mean the steady introduction of methods, use cases, and features that transform initial awareness into practical use. In the early days of PayPal, we found this utility through eBay — where PayPal could provide a trusted transaction between two parties who did not know each other. This trust was supported by various protections and a promise to never share a consumer’s full financial information.

Over the last two decades, we’ve consistently been reminded that payment options must be seamless, efficient, and beneficial. Critically, this means payments must be fast and inexpensive. The Ethereum mainnet has afforded immense awareness to PYUSD but has not solely fulfilled all the criteria needed to achieve PYUSD’s mission of being the stablecoin of commerce. To do this, PYUSD must also be issued on a network that enables payments to be incremental, quick and low-cost.

Since launch, our intention has been for PYUSD to be multichain as a way to offer users access, choice and flexibility while also scaling the token. Today, that intention becomes a reality. We have chosen Solana to help drive further adoption and prove PYUSD’s utility for daily use.

Several factors contributed to Solana being chosen for the PYUSD expansion, including its proven cost-effectiveness and high throughput. However, the more nuanced reason for choosing Solana relates to the unique features it enables for PYUSD; features that we believe are essential to further solidify PYUSD’s position as the preferred engine for commerce and payments.

PYUSD is enabled by Solana token extensions, bringing familiar fintech features to stablecoin payments. These token extensions are expanded on in the PYUSD Solana white paper:

• Confidential Transfers: allowing merchants the option to maintain confidentiality of transaction amounts while maintaining visibility of other transaction details for regulatory purposes. This is not dissimilar from today’s commerce – for instance, you cannot see the financial statements of your neighborhood coffee shop just because you buy from the shop daily.

• Transfer Hooks: enable PayPal developers to invoke custom programs during token transfers for individuals and merchants using PYUSD. These hooks will enable an ecosystem of useful features that mirror today’s “plug-ins” for commercial.

• Memo Fields: enables senders and receivers to include information along with payments, creating a more user-friendly experience for daily payments and record keeping.

These features are not merely nice-to-haves. We believe they are important features to provide to merchants if PYUSD is to grow in its utility to broader commercial segments. Accordingly, the launch of PYUSD on Solana will help to migrate PYUSD from the awareness to the utility phase in the long-term process of adoption. With PYUSD live on Ethereum and Solana — along with its utility on the PayPal and Venmo apps — we anticipate more tangible, UX-friendly use cases for PYUSD to emerge. In this effort, we encourage web3 and stablecoin developers to access PYUSD and begin building.

Ubiquity through Assimilation

The last and most enduring phase of the adoption of any new payments technology is ubiquity. Ubiquity is characterized by the seamless integration of the technology into daily life, where using it becomes second nature. In this stage, people use the technology effortlessly, often without conscious thought that they are using a “technology” — they are just paying.

For PayPal, ubiquity emerged as it became a way for eligible people across 200+ countries to send money to each other and to businesses. We saw PayPal's ubiquity emerge alongside digital globalization as a secure, reliable, and standardized approach to P2P, B2B, and B2C commerce.

Predictions about the future and about crypto in particular are famously unreliable. However, given our payments experience, we understand what it takes for new payment methods like PYUSD to become ubiquitous. Doing so means making transactions with PYUSD via PayPal and Venmo faster and cheaper, allowing it to be a preferred funding option for transactions. This means allowing PYUSD to move seamlessly across a decentralized multichain architecture, while also integrating effortlessly into everyday applications. In this future, using PYUSD should become so straightforward that the barrier to entry for crypto is nearly eliminated and people can use PYUSD on a daily basis without ever using the words crypto, web3, or blockchain.

Awareness, utility, and ubiquity lack clear beginnings or endings, often overlapping across regions and use cases. The decentralization of the internet and the disintermediation of finance is an ongoing process; with shifting goalposts in the months, years, and decades ahead. Regardless, PayPal continues on our journey to enable people to pay how they want, and we are thrilled to celebrate this launch with the rest of the Solana ecosystem and beyond.

To get started with PYUSD on Solana, download Phantom, Venmo, or PayPal. If you’re a builder, visit the PYUSD Solana white paper and visit the PYUSD faucet.

Think back to the last time you walked into your local coffee shop and paid for your latte. You tapped your phone or your card, grabbed your coffee, thanked the barista, and headed out for your morning commute. Easy, right?

In reality, as you walked away from the counter, you set off a chain of events that sent your digital payment bouncing between providers, banks, wallets, card networks, and processors. The end result of your — and millions of others’ — daily lattes is a vast web of payments steps that, though effective, still offers room for improvement.

Today’s Payment Rails

Your latte payment starts with your account and your digital wallet. When you tap your phone, your wallet and payment information are sent to the payment processor. The third-party payment processor is responsible for securing authorization from your payment instrument’s issuing organization (e.g. the bank that issued your card) through the appropriate card network. These processors are responsible for the first line of fraud prevention and implement complex fraud engine processes to help protect merchants and consumers alike.

By the time you walk away from the counter, the payment processor has submitted your transaction to your card’s network. The card network manages the authorization and transfer of money from your bank (the “issuer” bank) to the business’ bank (the “acquirer” bank). As a final step, the merchant transfers money from their acquirer account to whichever business account they want their money to ultimately end up in.

This sequence of events, while complex, facilitates transactions are secure and reliable. They’re designed to enable instantaneous commerce while also protecting both parties from fraud. Critically, today’s process does not place the burden of payments technology on the consumer or the merchant; theoretically, no matter what bank you or the merchant use, you can easily transact with each other without needing to worry much about the system that stitches together banks, services, and technologies to make that payment moment seamless.

Transactions vs. Payments

The latte analogy reveals something crucial about today’s payment rails: there is a nuance between a transaction and a payment. A transaction can be thought of as the simplified experience of buying a latte. You see the cost debited (technically ‘pending’) from your account. The merchant sees the sale as completed on their end. You walk away with your coffee.

A payment is the actual movement of money from your hands to the merchant's hands. As illustrated above, a payment is still happening long after you leave the coffee shop. There are two outstanding areas of improvements with payments.

• Time: Payments can take 1-3 days to settle. For the average consumer and merchant, this settlement period may not matter; at the end of the day, the system is trustworthy. However in certain cases, such as for small businesses and for larger value purchases, complex and expensive liquidity management solutions are necessary the longer it takes to get money into an account.

• Cost: Payments acquire fees as they move between intermediaries — which each needs to cover the cost of servicing that transaction. Transaction fees can add up, compounding the payment cost (i.e. the service of moving money).

The reality is today’s system works. You can walk away with your latte before the money technically reaches the merchant’s bank. You know if that jacket you took a chance on doesn’t fit, you can return it at the store and you’ll get the money back in your account. In other words, the overall payments ecosystem works. It allows us to exchange at scale, whether mere cents to tremendous sums, and with sufficient trust that it’ll all happen the way we expect.

Globally, we have come to expect and value these types of payment services that add value, convenience, and innovation to merchants and consumers. These types of value-add services can include: fraud protections, invoicing capabilities, customer service, reporting tools, rewards programs, returns support, and others. As finance evolves, any payments future should endeavor to retain these types of services that are needed, valued, and trusted.

While this system works effectively and these types of payment services will likely always incur a cost, innovations like crypto payments offer an opportunity to streamline the process, making it faster and driving costs lower and lower.This is where crypto, stablecoins, and PYUSD fit in.

PYUSD and the Future of your Latte

Transacting with crypto could allow us to streamline the steps in the secret life of your latte. Instead of a transaction moving through multiple third-party banks, networks, and processors, a crypto transaction could prove far more direct.

A crypto transaction starts with stablecoins in your digital wallet, which are then sent directly to a merchant’s digital wallet with the support of a virtual asset service provider (VASP). The nuance here is that a stablecoin is real, discreet value — not the representation of value.

By transferring the actual asset itself from one digital wallet to another, settlement times are eliminated and transaction costs can be reduced. What’s left is the VASP and the additional services it provides so that you and your coffee shop can both remain confident in the payment, while benefiting from more streamlined transactions.

By introducing PYUSD to consumers and merchants alike, PayPal envisions a future where money can move nearly instantaneously and fees can be reduced. This leads to greater choice for how consumers pay and merchants accept payments.

We’ll Say It Again: Pay How You Want

We believe crypto introduces a new way to send money between people and businesses that can benefit certain sectors of the economy today and in the future. Crypto has the potential to become a new payments rail - helping reduce the costs associated with moving money. Competition drives innovation and a new payments rail would drive all ecosystem players to focus even more on providing and charging for services that create a better payments experience for everyone. And enabling everyone to pay how they want.

For people to pay how they want, being able to send money locally, regionally, and globally with ease is vital. PayPal believes in the long-term opportunity of crypto to address fundamental issues that have made transfers at times difficult, costly, and time consuming. However, we know that belief isn’t enough to spur the widespread use of crypto. For crypto to become adopted, it must prove 1) immediately useful to people who are currently facing issues and 2) more efficient than the current system.

Cross-border p2p payments is one of the highest-opportunity ecosystems for crypto to prove immediately useful. In support of that opportunity, Xoom — PayPal’s overseas money transfer service — will charge no fees when users make transfers funded with PYUSD. This new funding option could help Xoom users collectively save millions of dollars a year in cross-border transaction fees.

Crypto must evolve from being a philosophically-driven alternative to traditional finance into an indispensable tool for simple, affordable global commerce. Bringing together Xoom and PYUSD allows us to take the first step in that direction — starting with p2p cross-border transactions.

Cross-border Payments and Xoom: A Global Snapshot

In the broad ecosystem of cross-border payments, some industries are more acutely impacted by high fees and inefficient operations. Sending money across borders is especially vulnerable to inefficiencies — historically, money sent from high to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are hit with costly fees and long settlement times.

In 2023, p2p cross-border payments to LMICs reached $669bn USD — an increase of 3.8% from last year. The average cost of p2p transfers originating in the United States was 5.7%, but the worldwide average cost to send money was 6.2%. Globally, the cost of p2p cross-border transfers differed between digital (4.6%) and in-store payments (6.9%). With digital payments accounting for 30% of p2p cross-border transfers, this means that globally in 2023 p2p international transfers resulted in $ 9.23bn USD in costs (WorldBank).

Xoom has been facilitating p2p cross-border payments for PayPal users since 2015. Today, Xoom is offered in over 160 destination countries, serving as a vital artery for the flow of funds between family and friends who rely on those funds for their livelihoods. PayPal knows that getting money sent across borders is only half the battle; many people still need to withdraw that money as physical cash. That is why Xoom recipients can withdraw transfers in over 350,000 cash pickup locations globally.

When sending money to friends and family, every cent counts.

Crypto, PYUSD, and the Future of P2P Cross-border Payments

PayPal believes that crypto offers a novel financial rail that can improve payment processes across various industries, including p2p cross-border payments. That future — in which the cross-border payments ecosystem at large is powered by stablecoin transactions and offers innate lower cost and improved efficiencies — will take time to build. The first step is to encourage more people to use crypto in a way that 1) delivers a distinct benefit, and 2) offers a smooth experience.

PayPal has an opportunity to take that first step by offering people a tangible, simple, and highly useful service — p2p cross-border transactions for 0% transfer fees* when using PYUSD to fund USD transfers on Xoom.

When funding overseas p2p transactions with PYUSD, Xoom recipients will not be charged any transaction service fees — helping users collectively save millions of dollars annually. Additionally, users will continue to send and receive money in the Xoom channels they’re used to, while recipients will still be able to benefit from over 350,000 cash out locations in their local currency.

Summarized more succinctly; use PYUSD to fund Xoom transfers and pay 0% transfer fees.* It is, for all intents and purposes, that simple.

Globalizing Crypto with P2P Payments

Yes, PayPal believes strongly in the broader value propositions of decentralization and financial sovereignty. But when it comes to helping people send money to friends and family across borders, we’re focusing singularly on giving people a useful, cost-effective service that we confidently know improves their daily lives. For us, that means giving people cheap ways to send money to others overseas today, while also building for a more holistic blockchain-powered cross-border financial ecosystem in the future.

Put in other words, with crypto, PayPal can do what we do best — offer people what they want from a payments company. Which is, unsurprisingly, their money.

* Transactions received in a currency other than USD are subject to an exchange rate.

PayPal’s Blockchain Research Group, in a strategic collaboration with Energy Web and DMG Blockchain Solutions Inc. (“DMG”), presents an opportunity to accelerate the clean energy transition for Bitcoin mining. Just like so many other mechanisms throughout web3, we propose the use of cryptoeconomic incentives to encourage desired behavior: Bitcoin miners using low-carbon energy sources in their mining operations. The full research paper, linked below, outlines an opportunity that not only rewards Bitcoin miners for operating with sustainable energy, but also increases the likelihood of participating entities to route on-chain transactions to these specific miners.

Read the full paper from the PayPal Blockchain Research Group.

Incentivizing desired activity with cryptoeconomics

Rational miners are driven by cryptoeconomic incentives. They expect to be rewarded with an asset (bitcoin BTC) that is more valuable than the resources they expended to acquire that reward. Much of blockchain’s history has focused on how to get a group of disparate, individual miners to all perform honestly and responsibly in the maintenance of a decentralized ledger.

Since 2008, Bitcoin has achieved the robust, secure, decentralized, and censorship-resistant maintenance of the ledger with its decentralized miner community. In other words, the fundamental cryptoeconomic structure of Bitcoin and its PoW consensus mechanism has proven successful. Now, the question is whether additional cryptoeconomic incentives can be layered on top of the fundamental PoW mechanism thereby allowing us to encourage more environmentally sustainable actions that we desire as a community.

PayPal’s Blockchain Research Group's partner EnergyWeb has developed a clean energy validation platform to permit Bitcoin miners to obtain low-carbon accreditation for their mining operations. These green miners are associated with public keys (which we refer to as green keys), to which rewards can be distributed. On-chain transactions are preferentially routed to green miners by being broadcasted with low transaction fees, but with some BTC reward “locked” in a multisig payout address. Green miners will be incentivized to mine these transactions, since they will be the only ones eligible for the additional “locked” BTC reward.

PayPal’s Blockchain Research Group hopes that this paper influences preferred behaviors by proposing ways in which fundamental cryptoeconomic incentives can be reapplied to improve and optimize existing, proven, strong networks. Sustainability is a significant topic of conversation for nearly every emerging and established industry in the world, and we aim to support the role of crypto in a sustainable future.

Read the full paper from the PayPal Blockchain Research Group.

PayPal and Venmo are the platforms distributing Celsius funds to creditors in the United States. For the thousands of you who have already received crypto in your PayPal and Venmo accounts, we are grateful for your business and honored by your trust.

Our message is straightforward: welcome to PayPal and Venmo. We take your trust seriously. We know this is not an easy task. We know that crypto ecosystems benefit from the presence of trusted actors that can enable easy conduits between fiat and web3. We fundamentally believe in the power and the promise of blockchain technologies and the tokenization of value. And we believe that PayPal has a role to play. We hope you are willing to join us on this journey.

Should you choose to convert your distribution into fiat and keep it in your PayPal or Venmo account or withdraw it to your bank account, we are here to help. Should you choose to keep your distributed crypto in your PayPal or Venmo wallet, convert it to another crypto, convert it into PYUSD, move it onchain to an external wallet - we are also here to support the evolution toward payments on blockchain rails.

We ask you for the opportunity to serve you, and we take that seriously. We ask you to join the millions of users that we serve today for their crypto and stablecoin needs on PayPal and Venmo. Our customer service is available to you via phone, email, or chatbot. Under our Eligible Unauthorized Transactions program, we offer protections against unauthorized purchases, sales, and transfers of your crypto. We provide onchain transfers to external wallets on all our supported tokens, including PYUSD. The choice is yours, and we hope that you will choose to stay with us in this journey.

25 years ago, we asked the Internet community to let us serve them in the emerging world of digital payments. In 2020, we began a similar journey with crypto; in late 2023, we advanced that journey by launching our PYUSD stablecoin. Last week, we asked over 150,000 recipients who were distributed their Celsius claims to do the same. We hope to see you in this new era of crypto and tokenized value.

Jose Fernandez da Ponte
SVP Blockchain, Crypto, and Digital Currencies
PayPal

Money is not powerful when it is accumulated; money is powerful when it moves. Billions of transactions occur worldwide every day, and payments are the single most tangible, frequent utility of money. Payments, however, are more than just an exchange of value; they are a story of progressive freedom. Every transaction we make - from buying a coffee to transferring funds overseas - is an expression of our financial autonomy. On the other hand, an inability to pay how we want limits our capacity to build, share, and harness value on our own terms.

PayPal emerged at a critical junction in the history of payments. From the earliest days of online commerce, we built ourselves as a beacon of trust to offer users the confidence to transact in a powerful but difficult new ecosystem. Now, over a decade into the emergence of blockchain technology, PayPal has yet again stepped up to take on a new challenge during a critical point in payment history. Just as we brought payments online, we are now bringing payments on-chain.

Our commitment throughout our tenure remains unchanged: to facilitate innovation in payments, allowing everyone to pay how they want.

The Digital Payment Revolution

The most recent tectonic shift in payments emerged with the internet. As vast troves of information migrated online, so too did the mechanisms for tracking and managing money — from account balances and transaction histories to broader commercial activities. This burgeoning ecosystem of online commerce set new expectations for how transactions should be conducted. People now sought the same immediacy and borderless reach in their payments as they experienced in their everyday online communication.

This digital shift highlighted an emerging gap. While the internet provided the infrastructure for global commerce, a trustworthy and efficient online payment system was conspicuously absent. People sought a platform that was not only secure, but also swift and intuitive. Businesses needed a dependable platform that would resonate among a growing online customer base.

PayPal bridged this gap between the new digital financial rails and the pressing need for consumer trust and accessibility. We built an ecosystem that delivered on the desire to let people pay how they want by giving them flexible and safe global payments.

Today, with over 400MM active accounts, PayPal’s success is a testament to more than just identifying a market gap. It’s about our singular and unwavering commitment to making payments easier. As the internet evolved and other fintech tools emerged over the decades, our focus remained unaltered. From facilitating eBay transactions in our early days to acquiring Venmo in 2013, our trajectory has been defined by the answer to a single question: how do people want to pay?

We’ve had decades to answer this question. At its highest level, the answer has remained fairly straightforward: people want fast, cheap, global payments. The solution over the last three decades has remained far more elusive.

PayPal USD (PYUSD) is a stablecoin backed by secure and highly liquid assets. Buy, sell, hold, and transfer - get started!

The New Gap: PayPal, Crypto, and New Financial Rails

While the digital payment landscape has strived to offer global, instantaneous, and seamless transactions, the reality often falls short. Payment innovations to date have been built on the same foundational financial rails that came with the rise of the internet. “Instant” settlements and “24/7” service is often, in reality, a veneer of convenience made possible by a service accepting (or shifting) risk.

Settlement times remain long for online payments (in the US, they average 2-3 days). Markets, banks, and services maintain working business hours, further extending settlement times. Employers struggle to pay an increasingly-dispersed workforce. An ever-globalizing population struggles to send money cheaply and quickly across borders. Businesses feel this friction most frequently, and consumers are still faced with long settlement times for actions that simply feel like they should be faster.

In short, people today are not necessarily able to pay how they want.

So, why crypto? The answer is a practical one. Crypto gets us closer to what people desire: fast, cheap, global payments. And, as we’ve said before — we are in the payments business.

Blockchain is the new financial rail — the new payment rail. Blockchain technology collapses how payments look and how they actually operate. Settlement times are near instant to both a customer and a business — at any time, anywhere in the world.

This cannot be understated; blockchain technology is the only technology that offers a fundamentally new way of doing payments. Though it may look like a fad to some, to PayPal, blockchain looks like rationale. If there is a payment instrument that offers round-the-clock, near immediate, and cost-effective transactions, it’s a practical choice to explore that solution. It’s not about jumping on a trend; it’s about recognizing and adopting an alternative, possibly better financial technology for payments.

Again, PayPal finds itself with an opportunity to bridge a gap between a new payments rail and its widespread adoption and trust. We have 400MM accounts that can be better served with an additional option of a blockchain-based payments solution. As we did in the earliest days of e- commerce, PayPal is again striving forward with a singular goal in mind: letting you pay how you want.

PayPal, Payments, and PYUSD

In 2020, we allowed PayPal and Venmo users to buy, hold, and sell crypto within their accounts. Last year, users could start transferring crypto assets they bought in their accounts to external wallets, including decentralized wallets.

We envision PayPal and Venmo continuing as pivotal hubs for commerce, serving as the primary conduits for businesses and individuals to transact for goods and services. By allowing for the transfer of crypto assets to and from PayPal and Venmo accounts, we’re better connecting the DeFi and CeFi worlds through a platform that excels in facilitating payments.

Our broad outlook on blockchain and crypto is neutral — that is, we have no ideological horse in this race. We know our customers continue to want easier, faster, and cheaper payments. We know that blockchain enables those types of payments in a way that the internet’s financial rails today do not. We believe our customers deserve to opt in to new solutions that address their underlying needs.

We do, however, have a stance on stablecoins. We believe they are a necessary tool to fully realize crypto’s capacity to serve as an accessible and flexible payments instrument. PYUSD, issued by Paxos, is our stance in the stablecoin space. It is our commitment to our customers. We are doing what we have done since 1998: giving our customers what they want.

What our customers want is easier payments. Businesses want to pay their vendors without worrying about settlement times. Individuals want to send money to their families without paying high fees and waiting days. Our customers don’t want to lose value while they’re waiting for today’s financial rails to catch up to their transactions.

Today, blockchain technology is the only innovation that provides a fundamentally new payment rail that helps deliver that customer desire. We have always aimed to be a vanguard in one aspect: always giving our customers what they want and deserve — trust, confidence, and ease. PYUSD is just the next evolution towards that goal.

Pay How You Want

At PayPal, we’ve always believed that the essence of money lies in its movement, and that the fast, cheap, and global movement of money is what our customers seek. The history of PayPal is the story of that unwavering commitment: empowering individuals and businesses to transact on their terms. We believe crypto has created a new paradigm to help achieve that goal for payments everywhere.

To say it another way, what we believe is simple: pay with crypto means pay how you want.

PayPal USD (PYUSD) is a stablecoin backed by secure and highly liquid assets. Buy, sell, hold, and transfer - get started!