Stablecoins, the $300 billion class of digital dollars, may have started out as a faster way to move money around the world, but companies are now asking a different question: What can they actually do with them?
That shift is driving a new phase of adoption, according to Chunda McCain, co-founder of Paxos Labs, who says the industry is moving beyond basic infrastructure toward real enterprise use cases.
“The first step was getting a stablecoin,” McCain said in an interview with CoinDesk. “The next question is: what now?”
Last week, Paxos Labs underscored that direction by raising $12 million in a strategic funding round led by Blockchain Capital, with participation from Robot Ventures, Maelstrom, and Uniswap. The lab unit was incubated under Paxos, the New York-based digital asset firm behind popular stablecoins like PayPal’s PYUSD (PYUSD) and Global Dollar (USDG). Paxos itself builds stablecoins and the immediate underlying infrastructure, while Paxos Labs intends to create tools for further use of those stablecoins.
With the fresh funding, Paxos Labs is building what it calls a “financial services stack” that allows companies to turn digital assets into products through a single integration.
Its newly launched Amplify Suite includes three main tools: Earn, which offers returns on digital assets; Loan, which allows lending against them; and Mint, which supports the issuance of branded stablecoins. The idea behind this is to allow companies to integrate tokens into a business and then layer capabilities over time.
Convert costs to income
For years, enterprise adoption of cryptocurrencies focused on “first touch” capabilities, such as trading, custody, or issuing a stablecoin. Those measures opened the door, but rarely generated returns on their own, according to McCain.
“stable coins [have been] loss leaders for years,” he said.
The opportunity lies in how those assets are used. Payments are a clear example: merchants typically give up 2% to 3% in fees, while stablecoin rails can reduce those costs and even generate returns on balances held on-chain.
“It turns what has always been a cost into revenue,” he said.
Some of the newest use cases are at the intersection of payments and credit. Payment providers already track business revenue and cash flow, putting them in a position to underwrite loans, McCain argued.
That could allow merchants to access performance-based financing in real time, while earning performance on incoming payments and settling instantly across borders. These models are still early, but the basic components are starting to come together, he said.
Not every company needs its own token
To take advantage of these benefits, not every company needs its own stablecoin.
While companies like PayPal have launched branded tokens to control payments and margins, issuing one requires a significant investment in liquidity, compliance and distribution.
“If you just need the economy, you don’t need to build your own,” McCain said.
Instead, many companies can integrate existing stablecoins and still benefit from lower costs and higher performance.
The change may lack publicity when large companies like Western Union announce their own token, but it has a tangible impact on the way companies operate.
Stablecoins are beginning to reshape margins, unlock credit, and change the way money moves globally, especially where traditional systems remain expensive or slow.
“It may sound boring, but this is math,” McCain said.
