PayPal USD

What it is

PayPal USD, ticker PYUSD, is a stablecoin, a token designed to hold a steady value of one US dollar. PayPal introduced it in August 2023, making it the first stablecoin launched by a major American payments company, a notable step for a firm with hundreds of millions of customer accounts. The token itself is issued not by PayPal but by Paxos Trust Company, a regulated New York trust firm that holds the reserves and mints and redeems the coins. The idea is simple: give PayPal and Venmo users a dollar that moves like crypto, settling in seconds at any hour.

How it works

Every PYUSD in circulation is matched by reserves held by Paxos. In Paxos’s own words, reserves are held entirely in US dollar deposits, US Treasuries and cash equivalents, and each token can be redeemed one-to-one for dollars. Paxos publishes monthly attestation reports, independent accountants’ statements confirming the reserves cover the supply. The token lives on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains, so it can move between ordinary crypto wallets as well as inside PayPal’s own apps. Oversight is a point PayPal and Paxos emphasise: Paxos states that its issuance of PYUSD and its reserves are supervised by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a US federal banking regulator.

The story so far

The launch drew scepticism, since early adoption was slow and the stablecoin market was already dominated by Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC. Growth came in stages: an expansion to Solana brought cheaper, faster transfers, and PayPal began wiring the token into its checkout, rewards and cross-border products rather than treating it as a standalone crypto asset. The clearer US rulebook for stablecoins that arrived in 2025 played to PYUSD’s strengths, since a fully reserved, attested, bank-supervised dollar token is exactly what the rules were written to encourage.

Where it stands

As of late July 2026, PYUSD ranks about 32nd among crypto assets with roughly $2.7 billion in circulation, according to CoinGecko. That remains a small fraction of Tether’s roughly $184 billion, so the race is far from settled. The interesting question is distribution: PayPal is one of very few issuers that can put a stablecoin in front of mainstream shoppers and merchants without asking them to learn anything new. Worth watching from here are the pace of issuance, how deeply PYUSD is embedded into PayPal and Venmo payment flows, and how the coin competes as federal regulation reshapes the stablecoin market. More context lives in our crypto section.