Good news for crypto enthusiasts! PayPal announced Tuesday that its PYUSD stablecoin, pegged to the U.S. dollar, is officially moving out of the experimental stage.
This exciting update was revealed at PayPal’s investor day in New York, where company executives outlined their ambitious vision for the future of the payments platform.
Michelle Gill, general manager of PayPal’s small and medium business division, explained the core idea in an interview with Bloomberg: “We were asking ourselves, ‘Can we make transactions smoother with PYUSD, eliminating currency conversions, annoying fees, and delays?'”
To kick things off, PayPal is planning to let merchants use PYUSD to pay their vendors through their existing bill-pay service. While it’s not live just yet, this feature is expected to launch later this year. Early reports from Bloomberg and Fortune indicate this system will allow merchants to easily onboard their vendors to the PayPal network for streamlined transactions.
And another important part of this initiative is simplifying cross-border payments. PayPal is aiming to help U.S. businesses easily pay international vendors and suppliers. According to PayPal, this integration is intended to simplify the hassle of currency conversion and, they hope, speed up transaction times in the process.
PayPal successfully processed its first business transaction using PYUSD last year, just one year after announcing their plans for the stablecoin.
This push for PYUSD comes at a time when stablecoin regulations in the U.S. seem to be becoming clearer. Industry observers are predicting that once the regulatory landscape is more defined, even more companies will jump into the stablecoin space.
Beyond just integrating PYUSD into its current services, PayPal is also aiming to broaden its entire product offerings. They’re planning to boost Hyperwallet, the payment platform they acquired in 2018 for a cool $400 million.
Hyperwallet handles large-scale payouts to contractors, freelancers, and sellers across the globe, and PayPal is aiming to make PYUSD a direct payment method on the platform by the end of Q2 this year.
PayPal CEO Alex Chriss mentioned at the investor event that although PayPal is sometimes viewed as a collection of separate acquisitions and products from the past, their current focus is on “actually bringing it all together” into a unified entity.
Reflecting this unified approach, the company has set an ambitious goal to increase its earnings by 20% by 2027.
As of writing, PayPal, trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker PYPL, had climbed to $77.57 in pre-market trading, a 4.7% jump from Tuesday’s closing price of $74.07.
