Charted: PayPal's stablecoin turns 1
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It's the first birthday of PayPal USD (PYUSD), the stablecoin from the payments giant.
Why it matters: The fact that the company has stuck to its guns on the product, despite lacking wild uptake, continues to give some credibility to blockchains as a medium for financial technology.
How it works: PYUSD is a vanilla stablecoin like USDC or USDT.
- Managed by stablecoin services company Paxos, each PYUSD token is backed by assets worth $1 held at a financial institution.
- It is not a major stablecoin at this point. Only the seventh largest, it ranks behind the one on Tron initially made as a copy of the ill-fated stablecoin from Terraform Labs.
Zoom in: Sending PYUSD to another PayPal user within the app is free, but it goes further than that.
- In April, PayPal made cross-border dollar transactions basically free for users of PYUSD, if they use its Xoom platform.
What we're watching: This could hint at how the company believes its stablecoin can stand out from the pack.
The latest: It's seen some modest uptake out there. Recently, a Singapore fintech integrated it, and so has a U.K.-based one.
- It also started issuing directly on Solana, the blockchain designed for speed.
