Stablecoins are moving past “fast money” infrastructure and into practical business tools that can reshape margins and unlock new revenue, according to Chunda McCain, co‑founder of Paxos Labs.
The $300 billion market of dollar-pegged tokens began life as a faster, cheaper way to move value. Now firms are asking a different question: once you have a stablecoin, what can you actually do with it? “The first step was getting a stablecoin,” McCain told CoinDesk. “The next question is: what now?”
Paxos Labs — an incubation arm spun out of Paxos, the New York firm behind stablecoins such as PayPal’s PYUSD and the Global Dollar (USDG) — is building answers. Last week it raised $12 million in a strategic round led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Robot Ventures, Maelstrom and Uniswap. Rather than issuing tokens itself (that remains Paxos’s focus), Paxos Labs is creating tooling companies can plug into to turn digital assets into revenue-generating products.
Its new “financial utility stack,” branded as the Amplify Suite, bundles three core services into a single integration:
- Earn: generate yield on digital-asset balances held onchain.
- Borrow: lend against tokenized assets to unlock credit.
- Mint: enable branded stablecoin issuance for firms that want their own token.
The playbook is simple: let companies onboard tokens quickly and then layer capabilities over time. Historically, enterprise crypto moves often stopped at “first-touch” steps — trading, custody, or issuing a stablecoin — which opened doors but seldom produced direct returns. “Stablecoins [have been] loss leaders for years,” McCain said. The new focus is on how those assets are used in business operations.
Payments provide a clear example. Merchants typically lose 2–3% to card and payment fees; routing receipts over stablecoin rails can cut those costs and even earn yield on balances sitting onchain. “You turn what has always been a cost into revenue,” McCain said.
Even more interesting are hybrid payment‑credit models. Payment processors already track merchant revenues and cash flow data, putting them in a strong position to underwrite loans. That could let merchants receive financing tied to real‑time performance, earn yield on incoming payments, and settle instantly across borders. The building blocks for these models are nascent but converging, McCain said.
Importantly, firms don’t always need to mint their own token to capture these benefits. Issuing a branded stablecoin — as PayPal and others have done — demands heavy investment in liquidity, compliance and distribution. “If you just need the economics, you don’t need to build your own,” McCain noted: many companies can plug existing stablecoins into their stacks and still realize lower costs and additional yield.
The shift may lack the splashy headlines of major brands launching bespoke tokens, but its implications are tangible: reworked margins, on‑demand credit products, and faster, cheaper cross‑border settlement where legacy systems are costly or slow. “It might sound boring, but this is the math,” McCain said — and for many businesses, that math could be the real catalyst for stablecoin adoption.
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