Key Points
- PayPal adds PayPal USD token on Solana.
- The company reportedly chose Solana for speed and low cost, despite outages.
PayPal, the first large financial company to launch a stablecoin, just added the PayPal USD token to the Solana blockchain, according to the latest reports.
The team at Solana announced the move via their X account. They noted that PayPal USD stablecoin issued by Paxos will leverage Solana and token extensions to serve more than 30 million merchants, empowering users with fast and secure stablecoin transactions.
1/📣Breaking News: @PayPal USD (PYUSD) is live on Solana!
PayPal USD stablecoin issued by @Paxos will leverage Solana and token extensions to serve over 30m+ merchants, empowering users with fast and secure stablecoin transactions. pic.twitter.com/h66iejTv50
— Solana (@solana) May 29, 2024
Solana’s speed and low-cost transactions led to PayPal’s decision
Solana’s speed and low transaction fees are the main triggers for this decision, according to Jose Fernandez da Ponte, senior vice president of the San Jose, Calif-based company’s blockchain, crypto, and digital currency group.
Bloomberg noted that Solana measured 1,423 transactions per second (tsp), according to the SolanaFM data tracker.
The trading volume over Solana’s blockchain has reached the highest in more than two days, with CoinMarketCap and DEX Screener data cited by Bloomberg, revealing that memecoins such as Slerf, Book of Meme, Snap, and Dogwifhat leading activity on DEXes.
Fernandez da Ponte said that retailers have to be able to sustain at least 1,000 tps. He also added that even though Ethereum does not have enough tps, the company also chose it due to its high familiarity to customers and its usefulness in processing high-volume transactions.
PayPal also launched PYUSD on Ethereum back in August 2023, and later added the dollar-pegged currency to its Venmo peer-to-peer payments service in September of the same year. Ethereum processes around 12 to 15 tps, Chainspect data provider reveals.
PYUSD currently has a market cap of over $398 million, according to CoinMarketCap, and by comparison, Tether has a market cap of almost $112 billion.
Fernandez da Ponte also noted that PYUSD activity mainly occurs on crypto exchanges and in DeFi, but PayPal is looking to expand its use in retail payments as well as in emerging markets from Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa as well.
Last month, PayPal enabled customers to use Xoom cross-border money transfer service in order to send funds abroad using dollars converted from PYUSD.
PayPal is confident that Solana is stable
Even if Solana faced its own setbacks a while ago, including technical issues that caused network slowdowns and outages, PayPal is confident that the network is stable and users can switch to Ethereum in case of an outage.
Fernandez da Ponte said that PayPal will likely add PYUSD to more blockchains in the future.
He continued and highlighted that the intention of the stablecoin from the beginning was to be multi-chain.
The general manager of payments at the Solana Foundation, Sheraz Shere, said that network improvements have been made to address the technical issues on Solana and these problems are now a thing of the past.
Last month, Solana rolled out a fix to address the network congestion issue.
The v1.17.31 release is now recommended for general use by MainnetBeta validators. This release contains enhancements which will help alleviate the ongoing congestion on the Solana Network.
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) April 15, 2024
The most recent outage on the network, as Bloomberg notes citing data from Solana Status, occurred back in February and lasted for five hours.