Payments platform PayPal confirmed that its stablecoin is expanding to the Solana network, which will make PayPal USD (PYUSD) faster and cheaper to transact. 

The announcement comes 9 months after the company introduced PYUSD. José Fernández da Ponte, senior vice president of PayPal's Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies and Digital Currency group, is very optimistic about the news. He assures:

“Making PYUSD available on the Solana blockchain furthers our goal of enabling a digital currency with stable value designed for commerce and payments.”

José Fernández da Ponte, senior vice president of the Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies and Digital Currency group at PayPal

The Solana network stands out for its ability to process large transactions at high speed and at low cost, that is, an extra benefit for commercial use cases.  

Until now, PYUSD only lived on the Ethereum main network, which does not offer the best conditions in terms of economics and speed. Since 2020, Ethereum attracted a large number of users and, for this reason, congestions became common . 

Currently Solana is the most used network to make transfers with stablecoins, according to the on-chain cryptocurrency analysis platform, Artemis. 

For his part, Sheraz Shere, general director of payments at the Solana Foundation, indicated that “the speed and scalability of the Solana network make it the ideal blockchain for new payment solutions that are accessible, profitable and instantaneous.” 

A disadvantage of Solana, compared to Ethereum, is its stability. On several occasions Solana has suffered technical malfunctions and has had to be paused. When this occurs, transactions cannot be processed in Solana for several hours.

Will Solana be able to boost PYUSD's takeoff?

PayPal's digital currency has been in the cryptocurrency ecosystem for 9 months, in collaboration with the Paxos trust company, which is in charge of issuance. It is backed by dollar deposits, Treasury and short-term bonds and cash equivalents.  

Despite PayPal being a renowned company in the financial industry, PYUSD has not had great success in terms of adoption so far. 

One of the challenges that PYUSD had ahead of it is to prevail in a market that is dominated by large players such as USDT, the stablecoin issued by the company Tether. 

With this advance, the PayPal stablecoin takes a step forward to try to attract new users, something that has not been happening so far.