How PYUSD holds its peg

PayPal USD carries PayPal's name, but Paxos issues it, holds the dollars and mints every token. It has no blockchain of its own: it's a token on seven chains, created when dollars reach Paxos and destroyed when they leave. Each transfer is only as final as the chain it happens on.

Read how it works

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Just minted and burned

    PYUSD tokens dollars, into and out of the reserve tokens being burned LayerZero's verified cross-chain message a chain's ledger flashes as it settles PYUSD reserve: Treasury repo, bills, cash
    Supply by chain Reading supplies…
    How this is read

    Each chain's raw on-chain supply, read from a public node every 10 to 60 seconds: totalSupply on the EVM chains, the mint account on Solana, and every balance Horizon reports on Stellar. PYUSD0, the LayerZero copy on other chains, isn't counted, because the PYUSD behind it is already counted here. Use the arrow keys to read each row.

    PYUSD supply on each chain
    ChainSupplyShareRead at
    Minted and burned
    • minted, up
    • burned, down

    Use the left and right arrow keys to read each column. In live mode each column is one minute; minutes before you connected include only Ethereum and Polygon.

    PYUSD minted and burned in each recent period
    PeriodMintedBurnedNet
    What just happened (illustrative) 0 PYUSD in circulation 0 in reserve 0 minted 0 burned 0 chains shown

      The parts that make this work

      PayPal brands it, Paxos issues it

      PYUSD is a token that Paxos promises to redeem for one US dollar. PayPal's name is on it and PayPal sells it to its users, but Paxos Trust Company is the issuer: it mints and burns every token, holds the reserve and publishes the reports. On December 12, 2025 Paxos converted from a New York trust company into a national trust bank supervised by the OCC, now Paxos Trust Company, N.A.

      PYUSD launched on Ethereum in August 2023 and was added to Solana in 2024, Arbitrum and Stellar in 2025 and Polygon in July 2026. The August 2026 report lists seven chains it is natively minted on: Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum One, Stellar, Polygon, Ink and X Layer. The same company issues Global Dollar (USDG), through different subsidiaries under Singapore and EU rules, with a different business model.

      Minting and redeeming

      Businesses with a Paxos account send dollars and receive newly minted PYUSD, or send PYUSD back and receive dollars, one for one. PayPal and Venmo users in the US buy and sell PYUSD inside the apps, and PayPal says it charges no fee to buy, sell, hold or transfer it there. Everyone else trades it on exchanges. That arbitrage holds the price near a dollar: when PYUSD trades below $1, an eligible customer can buy it and redeem it at par.

      On the EVM chains a mint shows up on-chain as a transfer from the zero address and a burn as a transfer to it, which is how live mode spots them. Paxos mints through a supply-control contract on each EVM chain. On October 15, 2025 it minted 300 trillion PYUSD on Ethereum by mistake and burned it within minutes; Paxos said it was an internal error, not a hack, and no customer funds were affected.

      What backs each token

      Paxos publishes a redemption assets report every month, examined by KPMG under AICPA attestation standards and the AICPA's 2025 stablecoin reporting criteria. On August 31, 2026 at 5:00 pm Eastern it reported 2,886,948,845 PYUSD outstanding against $2,893,935,877 of assets held for holders in segregated accounts, a surplus of $6,987,032. It held no money market funds that day.

      PYUSD reserve, August 31, 2026
      Held inUS dollars
      Overnight repo with two US banks, collateralised by Treasuries2,408,763,000
      US Treasury bills, maturing September 17 and October 1, 2026373,999,462
      Cash at commercial banks111,173,415
      Total redemption assets2,893,935,877

      By chain, the report counted 1,840,077,337 PYUSD on Ethereum, 743,923,272 on Solana, 277,212,847 on Arbitrum One, 13,392,135 on Stellar, 10,343,131 on Polygon, 2,000,099 on X Layer and 24 on Ink. Paxos's terms let it keep the interest the reserve earns beyond one dollar per token. The figures are published monthly and are not on-chain: live mode shows them as reported, not as they are now. Source: PYUSD Redemption Assets Report, August 2026 (PDF, dated September 24, 2026), linked from Paxos's PYUSD transparency page.

      Who pays holders, and who doesn't

      Paxos pays nothing to PYUSD holders. PayPal runs its own rewards programme: US users who opt in and hold at least 1 PYUSD in the PayPal app are paid a variable rate monthly in PYUSD, advertised at 4 % in September 2026, set by PayPal and changeable at any time. That makes PYUSD a two-company product: Paxos runs the token and the reserve, PayPal runs distribution and pays its own customers. USDG, from the same issuer, works the other way round: Paxos passes most of the reserve's earnings to the exchanges and apps in its network, and they decide what to pay users. USDC sits in between: Circle keeps the reserve income and shares part of it with Coinbase under a distribution deal.

      A transfer is only as final as its chain

      Paxos takes no part in an ordinary transfer. When you send PYUSD on Ethereum, it's settled like any other Ethereum transaction: included in a block, then final after about two epochs of validator attestations. On Solana it's final when the slot is finalised, on Stellar when its validators close the ledger a few seconds later, on Polygon PoS by its own validators with checkpoints to Ethereum. Arbitrum, Ink and X Layer are layer 2s that order transactions themselves and settle to Ethereum. The same token has as many kinds of finality as it has chains.

      LayerZero, PYUSD0 and moving between chains

      Since November 2024 PYUSD has used LayerZero's omnichain token standard to move between Ethereum and Solana: the token is burned on the source chain and minted on the destination once the message is confirmed by verifiers that PayPal and Paxos chose, run by Paxos, Google Cloud and LayerZero Labs. Since September 2025 a second form, PYUSD0, reaches chains Paxos doesn't mint on, such as Avalanche, Sei, Tron and Aptos, through LayerZero's Stargate Hydra bridge, which holds native PYUSD in a pool and issues PYUSD0 against it. PYUSD0 is redeemable one for one but isn't counted separately in Paxos's report, and live mode leaves it out to avoid counting the same dollars twice.

      Freezing, compliance and the law

      Paxos can freeze an address and wipe a frozen balance; the token contracts carry those powers for legal and sanctions compliance. The August report showed no access-restricted PYUSD. As an OCC-supervised national trust bank, Paxos says it applies the reserve rules of the GENIUS Act, which became law on July 18, 2025 and takes effect on January 18, 2027 or 120 days after regulators finish its rules, whichever is earlier: backing one for one with cash, deposits, short Treasury bills, Treasury repo or government money market funds, with monthly disclosure.

      What live mode shows, and what the animation simplifies

      Live mode reads all seven chains straight from public nodes every 10 to 60 seconds and adds them up. On Ethereum it reads every new block's PYUSD transfers, which gives the transfer rate, volume and every mint and burn; on Arbitrum, Polygon and X Layer it polls for mints and burns every 10 to 12 seconds; on Solana, Stellar and Ink it shows a change in supply between two readings as a net mint or burn. Every figure is real except the reserve, which comes from the latest monthly report and is labelled with its date. The animation draws the reserve as one vault and each chain as a small ring of wallets; LayerZero's message is drawn passing the vault, though Paxos's verifier is only one of three. Step-by-step mode starts from an illustrative billion. Read Paxos's PYUSD documentation for addresses and details.