Paxos

Paxos is a New York company that issues tokens for other brands and for itself, and holds the assets behind them. Charles Cascarilla and Rich Teo started it in 2012 as itBit, a bitcoin exchange; in 2015 it took a New York trust charter and renamed itself Paxos Trust Company. That charter is the business. It let Paxos hold customer money as a fiduciary, which is what PayPal, Binance, Robinhood and Mastercard were buying when they signed with it.

Today the company does four things: it issues stablecoins (PYUSD for PayPal, USDG for its own Global Dollar Network, the older USDP) and the gold token PAXG; it runs a brokerage and custody API that powers crypto buying inside other apps, including PayPal and Venmo; it owns the wallet firm Fordefi, bought in November 2025 for a reported price above $100 million (Paxos); and through Paxos Securities Settlement Company it clears securities trades on a blockchain under an SEC registration granted in May 2026.

Paxos says its platform serves more than 650 institutions. It is private, still led by Cascarilla as CEO, and has not announced a funding round since the $300 million Series D in April 2021 that valued it at $2.4 billion.

PayPal USD launched in August 2023. The split of roles is the thing to understand: Paxos is the issuer, so every PYUSD is a claim on Paxos's reserve, attested monthly and held under Paxos's charter. PayPal is the distributor, which lists the coin in PayPal and Venmo, pays rewards on balances and decides where it goes next. PYUSD is not a PayPal liability, and it is not a stock: searches for "PYUSD stock" are usually after PayPal's own shares (PYPL), which have nothing to do with the reserve.

Figures from DefiLlama. PayPal pays a variable reward on PYUSD held in its apps, advertised at 3.7% when it started in April 2025. That reward comes from PayPal as distributor, not from Paxos as issuer, a line the GENIUS Act drew in July 2025 by barring issuers from paying interest. Buying PYUSD is simplest inside PayPal or Venmo in the US; since March 2026 PayPal offers it in 70 markets (PayPal newsroom). How it compares on reserves and liquidity is on our PYUSD card.

Paxos issues more tokens than any other regulated US issuer, and they differ in who owns the brand and which regulator stands behind them:

USDG is the one Paxos is betting on. Launched in November 2024 out of Singapore, it runs as the Global Dollar Network: exchanges and apps that hold and distribute USDG, including Robinhood and Kraken, get a share of the income on its reserves, which is Paxos's answer to the deals Circle cuts with Coinbase. It passed $3 billion outstanding in 2026 (DefiLlama).

USDP has shrunk to about $28 million. Despite the searches for a "USDP redemption smart contract", there is no on-chain redemption: you redeem USDP, PYUSD or PAXG for dollars or gold through a verified Paxos account, and the token contracts only mint and burn on Paxos's instruction. PAXG holders can take physical delivery of bars through Paxos; the gold sits in Brink's vaults in London.

From 2019 Paxos issued BUSD for Binance, which made it one of the three largest stablecoins in 2022. On 13 February 2023 the New York DFS ordered Paxos to stop minting it, and the same week Paxos disclosed that SEC staff had sent it a Wells notice arguing BUSD was an unregistered security. Holders could still redeem, and BUSD shrank from about $16 billion to near zero over the following year.

1. 0113 Feb 2023: NYDFS orders Paxos to cease minting BUSD, citing unresolved issues in its oversight of Binance.
2. 02Feb 2023: SEC staff send a Wells notice over BUSD.
3. 039 Jul 2024: SEC staff tell Paxos they will not recommend enforcement (Paxos).
4. 047 Aug 2025: NYDFS settlement, $26.5 million penalty and $22 million of compliance spending (NYDFS).

The SEC side ended without a case. The New York side did not. NYDFS found that Paxos never did adequate due diligence on Binance and that about $1.6 billion of transactions on Binance between 2017 and 2022 were tied to illicit actors, including darknet markets and sanctioned entities. No BUSD holder lost money; the finding was about who Paxos chose to work with.

The operating entity is now Paxos Trust Company, N.A., a national trust bank supervised by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The OCC conditionally approved the conversion from a New York limited-purpose trust charter on 12 December 2025, and Paxos says it converted that day (Paxos). An uninsured national trust bank takes no deposits and makes no loans, so PYUSD holders are not covered by FDIC insurance. The protection is that reserves are held for token holders and kept apart from Paxos's own money.

Paxos is not a public company: there is no Paxos stock to buy and no 10-K or 20-F on EDGAR for the trust company. What it does publish is a reserve report per token each month, a self-report plus an attestation by KPMG since February 2025. Those attestations confirm reserves against tokens on a date. They are not an audit of Paxos's own balance sheet, and we could not find published annual accounts or a stated fiscal year end for the group.

Outside the US, USDG is issued by Paxos Digital Singapore under Monetary Authority of Singapore rules and by Paxos Issuance Europe in Finland under MiCA.

The October 2025 mint is the one to remember. A transfer meant as a few hundred million became 300,000,000,000,000 PYUSD, more than twice world GDP, credited to a Paxos-controlled address. Paxos burned it and said no customer funds were affected (The Block). Nobody lost money, but security firms pointed out that one externally owned key could mint without limit, which is exactly the control a regulated issuer is paid to have.

Paxos Labs is a separate company spun out in 2025 with a $12 million round led by Blockchain Capital; it builds DeFi plumbing around USDG and PAXG. Its products are not issued by the trust company.