PayPal announced today that PYUSD, its stablecoin for payments and transfers, is now available on Venmo. PYUSD is available to select users starting today and will be rolling out fully in the coming weeks. Venmo users can purchase PYUSD and send it to others on PayPal, Venmo and compatible external wallets.
Users using compatible external wallets, and merchants accepting payments in PYUSD, will also be able to receive transfers from Venmo users. PayPal notes that blockchain network fees apply.
PYUSD, which launched last month, is issued by Paxos Trust Company and is backed by U.S. dollar deposits, short-term U.S Treasuries and similar cash equivalents. Initially, about $24.9 million PYUSD came from Paxos treasury. As it stands, the total supply of circulating PYUSD is $44.376 million, according to Etherscan data.
“PYUSD is already present in native crypto experiences, and continues to be made more broadly available as the ecosystem grows,” the company said in a blog post. “In the few weeks since its launch in the open market, PYUSD is already present on select exchanges including Crypto.com, Bitstamp, Coinbase, and Kraken; leading wallets like MetaMask, Ledger and Phantom; custodians like Fireblocks, Copper, Paxos and Fordefi; crypto payment service providers like Bitpay; and already supported by some of the most widely used decentralized applications.”
PYUSD also announced that it has been greenlisted by the New York State Department of Financial Services.
A stablecoin is a type of cryptocurrency whose value is tied to an external asset, such as the U.S. dollar. There is some controversy around stablecoins. Last year, Meta ended up abandoning its plan of having its own stablecoin, called Diem, after regulatory backlash. PayPal itself paused working on its stablecoin earlier this year amid regulatory scrutiny of crypto, as reported by Bloomberg at the time.
PayPal first introduced crypto services back in 2020 when it began letting users in the U.S. buy, hold and sell cryptocurrencies. Then, in 2021, PayPal announced the launch of Checkout with Crypto, a feature that allowed consumers to check out at millions of online businesses using cryptocurrency. Last year, the company gave users the ability to transfer cryptocurrency from their accounts to other wallets and exchanges.