PayPal’s stablecoin PYUSD surpassed $1 billion in market cap on Aug. 24, according to CoinGecko data.
On an X (formerly Twitter) post, PYUSD’s issuer Paxos celebrated the feat, highlighting how fast the stablecoin crossed the important mark when compared to its peers, USD Coin (USDC) and Tether USD (USDT).
CoinGecko data shows that it took 351 days for PYUSD to cross the billion threshold, while USDC and USDT exceeded the same mark within 616 and 1024 days, respectively.
Notably, most of the PYUSD market cap is circulating on Solana, less than three months after PayPal decided to expand the issuance of its stablecoin outside of Ethereum on May 29.
As on-chain data shows, over $647 million in PYUSD is deployed on Solana, with roughly $430 million locked as collateral for lending on the money market platform Kamino.
The significant amount of PYUSD allocated at Kamino can be explained by the high annual percentage yield (APY) offered by the platform, currently at a base of 13.63% and 14.6% with bonuses.
The second largest application for PYUSD is the liquidity pool USDC/PYUSD at the decentralized exchange Orca, which has $50.4 million locked.
On Ethereum, most of the PYUSD is locked in the FRAX/PYUSD liquidity pool created at the decentralized exchange Curve Finance, with $19.5 million allocated.
Tough competition
Despite the rapid growth, the PYUSD still faces heavy competition, both on Solana and on the broader stablecoin market.
On-chain data shows that USDT holds a $76 million lead over PYUSD on Solana. Yet, this could soon be overturned, as PayPal’s stablecoin grew 171% over the past 30 days, while USDT shrank 1.35%.
Nevertheless, USDC is nearly 4x larger than PYUSD in Solana’s ecosystem, amounting to $2.5 billion.
On the broad stablecoin ecosystem, PYUSD is behind five other tokens in market cap. USDT dominates the $162 billion sector, with a market cap of nearly $118 billion.
USDC is the second-largest stablecoin, inching closer to $35 billion. DAI is third, with over $5.1 billion in market size, while First Digital USD boasts a $3.1 billion market cap. Ethena USDe wraps up the group with $2.9 billion in size.
