Stablecoins, $300 billion class digital dollars, may have started as a way to move money around the world faster, but companies are now asking different questions. What can you actually do with it?
Chunda McCain, co-founder of Paxos Labs, said this shift is driving a new phase of adoption, with the industry moving beyond basic infrastructure to real-world business use cases.
“The first step was to get a stablecoin,” McCain said in an interview with CoinDesk. “The next question is, what now?”
Last week, Paxos Labs highlighted its direction by raising $12 million in a strategic funding round led by Blockchain Capital, with participation from Robot Ventures, Maelstrom, and Uniswap. This lab division was fostered under Paxos. Paxos is the New York-based digital asset company behind popular stablecoins such as PayPal. $PYUSD ($PYUSD) and Global Dollar (USDG). While Paxos itself will build the stablecoins and their direct underlying infrastructure, Paxos Labs plans to build tools for further use of these stablecoins.
Paxos Labs is using the new funding to build what it calls a “financial utility stack” that enables companies to turn digital assets into products through a single integration.
The newly launched Amplify Suite bundles three core tools. Earn provides income for digital assets. Borrow allows loans to be made to them. and Mint, which supports the issuance of branded stablecoins. The idea behind it is to allow companies to integrate the token into their business and add functionality over time.
Turn costs into profits
For years, corporate cryptocurrency adoption has focused on “first touch” functions such as trading, storage, and stablecoin issuance. According to McCain, these steps opened doors but did little to generate benefits on their own.
“Stablecoins have been loss leaders for many years,” he said.
The opportunity lies in how those assets are utilized. Payments are an obvious example. While merchants typically waive fees of 2% to 3%, stablecoin rails can reduce those costs and even generate yield from the balances held on-chain.
“You can turn something that was always a cost into a revenue,” he said.
Some of the more novel use cases sit at the intersection of payments and credit. Payment providers already track merchants’ revenue and cash flow, so they are in a position to underwrite loans, McCain argued.
This could allow merchants to obtain loans based on real-time performance, while earning yield on deposits and enabling instant cross-border payments. Although these models are still in their early stages, the building blocks are starting to come together, he said.
Not every company needs its own token
Not all companies need their own stablecoin to enjoy these benefits.
Companies like PayPal have launched branded tokens to manage payments and margins, but issuing tokens requires significant investments in liquidity, compliance, and distribution.
“If all you want is economics, you don’t have to build your own economics,” McCain said.
Many companies can instead integrate existing stablecoins and benefit from lower costs and higher yields.
This change may lack the hype that comes with big companies like Western Union announcing their own tokens, but it will have a tangible impact on how companies operate.
Stablecoins are beginning to reshape margins, unlock trust, and change the way money moves around the world, especially in regions where traditional systems remain costly or slow.
“It may sound boring, but this is the math,” McCain said.
