PayPal’s PYUSD +0.43% stablecoin, which launched in August through a partnership with custodian firm Paxos, has shown substantial growth in market capitalization that’s now exceeding $290 million.
After its rollout, PYUSD’s total supply reached 43.3 million by the end of August. At that time, Paxos held 90% of PayPal’s PYUSD supply in custody, indicating a concentrated distribution.
The market capitalization has since surged over five-fold to $293 million, according to The Block’s price page. Notably, in the past month, the market cap increased 70% from $170 million, per Coingecko data. This positions PayPal among the top-ten stablecoin issuers.
Tether USD leads the stablecoin niche with a market capitalization of over $94 billion.
PYUSD’s adoption on centralized exchanges such as Crypto.com and Kraken, along with its integration into decentralized finance protocols, appears to have contributed to its growth.
Additionally, the distribution of PYUSD has broadened. Currently, Crypto.com holds the largest portion with 112.8 million tokens, representing 38.7% of the total supply. This is followed by DeFiance Capital with 39.1 million (13.4%), Curve with 32.4 million (11%), Kraken with 31.92 million, and Paxos with 30 million, according to on-chain data provided by Nansen.
DeFi integrations
DeFi protocols have started to integrate the stablecoin. Curve, a popular DEX protocol, currently includes a liquidity pool with PYUSD and Frax’s decentralized stablecoin, with a total value locked of $135 million. The pool enables trading between the two stablecoins. Community members of leading decentralized lending protocol Aave have proposed to the integration of PYUSD as well.
“For PYUSD, there are significant balance changes over the past 30 days, with a noticeable increase in the PYUSD/FRAX Curve liquidity pool,” Edward Wilson from Nansen said.
Regarding on-chain activity, Nansen noted that it is primarily observing PYUSD swaps into other stablecoins, WETH, and ETH, with expectations for further integration with DeFi protocols.
The stablecoin’s daily trading volume was recorded at about $29 million in the last 24 hours, slightly less than 10% of its market cap.
