PayPal to let Venmo users buy new stablecoin after unveiling PYUSD to wide applause from the crypto industry

The ability to purchase PYUSD is now open to select users and it will be rolled out to more customers in the coming weeks, PayPal, which owns Venmo, said in a statement.  Crypto enthusiasts already can buy PYUSD on a subset of exchanges, which include Coinbase, Crypto.com, Bitstamp, and Kraken.

“This is a big deal because this is the first time that you’re going to have interoperability between the PayPal and Venmo wallets,” Jose Fernandez da Ponte, PayPal’s head of crypto, told Fortune. 

Previously, he said, users were unable to send dollars between the two. “It’s the first instance of wallet interoperability with no costs,” Fernandez da Ponte added.

The addition of PYUSD to Venmo comes a little more than six weeks after the payments giant unveiled the stablecoin to much fanfare from the crypto industry after it paused development on the token earlier in the year.

In January 2022, PayPal reportedly was in the exploratory stage of its forthcoming stablecoin, and in June of that year, the payments company received a BitLicense from the New York Department of Financial Services, essentially a regulatory stamp of approval to conduct business in crypto in New York.

However, in February 2023, PayPal put a pause to its efforts after Paxos, a crypto company that makes bespoke stablecoins for other corporations, was reportedly in the crosshairs of the NYDFS. Just days later, Paxos announced that it received a Wells Notice from the Securities and Exchange Commission for its work with Binance on the stablecoin BUSD.

PayPal’s stablecoin efforts were kept under wraps for months, but then the company in August finally unveiled PYUSD, which, unsurprisingly, was built in collaboration with Paxos.

The crypto industry cheered the publicly traded company’s entrance into the stablecoin market, even though some questioned how the stablecoin would differentiate itself from existing heavyweights Tether and USDC.

In the month since its launch, the stablecoin’s market capitalization is a bit less than $44 million, according to a recent report on the coin released by Paxos. This pales in comparison to that of Tether, which is now a bit above $83 billion, or USDC, which is a bit below $26 billion.