Solana
PayPal allows retail to play with PYUSD on Solana
Payments giant PayPal’s (PYPL) stablecoin PYUSD is coming to Solana almost a year after its debut on the Ethereum blockchain.
The launch could spark new interest in a modestly sized crypto asset that hasn’t caught fire despite its brand backing. PYUSD has around 8,600 holders on the Ethereum blockchain and a market capitalization of less than $400 million, which is tiny compared to the largesse of its competitors at Circle and Tether, crypto-native companies.
“Ethereum works quite well,” said Jose Fernandez da Ponte, PayPal’s senior vice president of blockchain. “But if you’re interested in retail payments like we are, you need at least 1,000 transactions per second, and you need transaction costs in cents, not dollars.”
Beyond cost and speed, PYUSD also has new superpowers on Solana that were not possible on Ethereum. It uses this chain’s “Token Extensions” standards to allow merchants to make their transfers a little more confidential, for example. This is one of the few compliance and programmability powers for PYUSD.
CORRECTION (May 29, 1:26 p.m. UTC): Corrects PYUSD market cap from $400,000 to $400 million.