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PayPal's PYUSD Launches on Stellar to "Revolutionize Commerce" | Markets Outlook
00:07:50
Announcing PayPal PYUSD on Stellar with PayPal's Larry Wade and Stellar's José Fernández Da Ponte.
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Transcript35 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
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B
Now we're joined by Larry Wade, Global head of compliance and regulatory relations for crypto at PayPal and Jose Fernandez Duponte, President and Chief Growth Officer at the Stellar Development Foundation. Guys?
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A
Yes.
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B
Are you ready for it?
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A
Ready.
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B
All right, who's going to do it? Larry?
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A
Got it. I got it. Well, one extremely thankful to be here. Awesome. Breaking news. We are now officially live with PySD on Stellar. Extremely excited, great partnership with Jose and Stellar foundation and we cannot wait to deploy this chain and really help to revolutionize commerce. So we're excited.
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B
All right, so we have PUSD on Stellar. Jose, we are merging the two worlds that I at least know you from. Talk to us a little bit about what this means for Stellar to have the PayPal stablecoin on the Stellar network.
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C
Then peanut butter and jelly. So these are two of the favorite things that I have. I think that is incredibly relevant if you think of PayPal and PUSD. PUSD is obviously the OG of stablecoins issued by large fintechs. PayPal went into their space way before it was fashionable. It's one of the largest stablecoins issued in the US at 1.3 billion in market cap. One thing that is probably not very well known is it's one of the fastest growing stablecoins in the world. It's up 160% in market cap year to date. And obviously it's supported in the PayPal and Vemo system. What does it mean for US users of Stellar Wallets anywhere? Now they have a way, if you have a POSD and a Stellar in a Stellar wallet, let's say cheaper cash or bitcoin.com, now you can send value to millions of Vemo and PayPal users. And when they go live with crypto that they have announced they will be able to pay from Stellar wallets and millions of PayPal merchants. If we want to be the blockchain for everyday financial services, PayPal is definitely a huge partner and a great distribution channel for us doing that I'm interested in.
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D
Both Stellar and PayPal had an early mover advantage in this space and I think you know, the fact that that Stellar was always a blockchain really built for payments and remittances. PayPal is a juggernaut in that. How does this really serve the long term vision of PayPal?
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A
Yeah, I mean, we're all in on crypto, as our CEO Alex Chris likes to say. We want to revolutionize commerce and I believe we have tailwinds now that we have not seen since the inception of this industry. So being able to ensure that we have a chain with integrity that's fast and cheap because ultimately faster, cheaper, programmable with near, you know, instant finality, those are the important things that you need as you guys start to integrate with for example our two sided network, which we have approximately 400 million wallets worldwide, with merchants and consumers and there's just a lot of friction and pain points that we feel this technology can benefit. And obviously, you know, you need to ensure that you have the right chain aligned in the stablecoin.
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B
Larry, I'm sure folks watching at home are curious about the due diligence you've done when, when choosing a chain.
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C
Yeah.
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B
What kind of due diligence goes into this process? How can you assure folks at home that Stellar, you know, is a network that they can put their trust in?
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A
Absolutely. And by USD is a regulated stablecoin and obviously compliance and consumer protection are front and center for PayPal. So you know, we have, I won't go too much into the weeds, but robust coin listing policies, continuous monitoring and vetting to ensure the integrity of chains and partners, key third parties, just overall ensuring that upfront we do what is required, that we continue to monitor and if things change, we can deprecate. But it's very robust, regulatory compliant and also not just the US regulators. But thinking about how does this interact with regulators around the world.
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D
Jose, what does a partnership like this bring to Stellar? You know, you guys are already known as being again sort of ahead of the curve in this, but I assume the more brands, the more use cases are really what sort of justifies the hard work you've put in?
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C
Look, we were talking about what it goes into those diligence. This is this quote from, I think it's a Nobel Peace Prize from Kenya. Who's saying what people interprets that fearlessness is persistence. Right. So we've been at this game for a long, long time. One of the things that we take a ton of Pride is our 99.99 uptime over 10 years. So those are things that, and PayPal has been at this for even longer. We really think that the road to mass adoption goes through enterprises and institutions. The developer ecosystem is fantastically active and vibrant as we are seeing in this conference over these days, bringing more names like PayPal, like Franklin Templeton, like WisdomTree, like MoneyGram. All those are channels that will help us get this technology to the masses because we need to meet users where they are and people want to use their PayPal account, people want to use their Venmo account. Merchants want to interact with them. So we want to be in as many places as we can. So this technology is in the water supply and it disappears in the background so users will meet us where they want to interact with us.
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B
Speaking of use cases, we've heard of PayFi. Jose, just kind of explain what that is for us and how it works.
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C
PayFi is one of the versions of DEFI you want where merchants can get advances. Think of it as similar to a working capital alone. I am a merchant, I have a receivable and if I can use that receivable as collateral to receive funding in pisd. There are a number of players in the ecosystem on the Defi ecosystem at Stellar that provide that and it's a huge advantage especially for smaller and medium sized merchants in some of the geographies where access to credit is more limited.
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B
I love to hear your perspective on PayBI.
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A
Interestingly enough, early in my career I was an SMB credit analyst.
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B
Okay.
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A
So this is near and dear to my heart and understanding that even when a small to medium sized business has revenue and is even profitable, working capital is usually one of those constraints that can kind of make or break an organization. So when you're thinking of net terms and standby layers of credit and assignment of proceeds, when you can utilize blockchain technology and the ability to tokenize and bring that liquidity, my goodness, I think it could be a game changer for that space and I'm really excited about it.
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B
Larry, when Jose was at PayPal, I asked him this question I'm going to ask you.
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A
Go for it.
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B
Are we going to see a consolidation of stablecoins?
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C
That's a good question.
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A
I will say this. We are very bullish on the utility of PyUSD. We do believe that, you know, overall there'll be a number of stable coins and we want the ecosystem to grow and win. But we are really focused on the use cases that we can actually deploy for USD to and partner with organizations such as Stella.
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D
You know, I'm interested now and hear both your perspectives. If we were having this conversation ten, eight years ago a lot of people would talk about all the illicit side of payments. Now this conversation is happening. The top governments in the world, the top firms in the world, we're not hearing that conversation very much anymore. But but focusing on compliance and how we're doing this correctly is something that I probably people has had to think about since inception.
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A
Yes.
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D
How do you apply that thinking to the crypto industry and blockchain it's funny.
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A
Again near and dear to my heart here. Yeah when we first started there was a notion of are we a bit too slow because we had to go about it in a compliant and thoughtful way. I can say this because I've been doing this for a long time now from bsa, AML sanctions to fraud typologies, et cetera. This technology allows you to actually manage your risk more effectively. It will allow you to partner with regulators more effectively just because there's more transparency, there's more ability to understand different patterns, et cetera and you can actually move more swiftly depending on what you see because things are on chain. So I'm actually bullish on the compliance aspect of this and I think we're only going to continue to see different groups come in and bring various solutions.
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B
Jose, Larry, thank you so much for joining us at the desk and breaking that news. Congratulations on the partnership.
- [07:43]
A
Really excited. Thank you.
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C
Thanks.