The $300 billion stablecoin market has evolved from merely facilitating faster global transactions to enabling businesses to explore new use cases, driving a fresh wave of adoption, according to Paxos Labs co-founder Chunda McCain, who notes that the industry is shifting its focus from basic infrastructure to practical business applications. In a recent interview with CoinDesk, McCain underscored this transition, stating, "The initial step was obtaining a stablecoin. The next question is: what's next?" Paxos Labs recently secured $12 million in strategic funding, led by Blockchain Capital, with participation from Robot Ventures, Maelstrom, and Uniswap, to develop a "financial utility stack" that allows companies to integrate digital assets into their products through a single integration. The newly launched Amplify Suite offers a bundle of three core tools: Earn, which provides yield on digital assets; Borrow, which enables lending against these assets; and Mint, which supports the issuance of branded stablecoins.
This suite is designed to let firms integrate tokens into their business and add capabilities over time. Transforming Costs into Revenue For years, the focus of enterprise crypto adoption has been on "first-touch" capabilities such as trading, custody, or issuing a stablecoin. However, these initial steps rarely generated significant returns on their own, according to McCain. "Stablecoins have been loss leaders for years," he noted.
The opportunity lies in how these assets are utilized. Payments are a prime example: merchants typically incur 2% to 3% in fees, while stablecoin-based transactions can reduce these costs and even generate yield on balances held on the blockchain. "You convert what has always been a cost into revenue," McCain explained. Some novel use cases emerge at the intersection of payments and credit.
Payment providers already track merchant revenues and cash flow, positioning them to underwrite loans, McCain argued. This could enable merchants to access financing based on real-time performance, earn yield on incoming payments, and settle transactions instantly across borders.
Although these models are still in their early stages, the building blocks are starting to come together, he said. Not Every Company Needs Its Own Token To capture these benefits, not every company needs to issue its own stablecoin. While companies like PayPal have launched branded tokens to control payments and margins, issuing a token requires significant investment in liquidity, compliance, and distribution. "If you just need the economics, you don't need to build your own," McCain said.
Many companies can instead integrate existing stablecoins and still benefit from lower costs and added yield. This shift may lack the hype associated with big firms like Western Union announcing their own token, but it has a tangible impact on how businesses operate. Stablecoins are starting to reshape profit margins, unlock credit, and change how money moves globally, particularly where traditional systems remain costly or slow. "It might sound boring, but this is the math," McCain said.