PayPal Makes Retail Stablecoin Play with PYUSD on Solana

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.

“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.