PayPal doubles down on crypto, investing in Paxos

PayPal showed interest in doing more than using Paxos’ services to integrate crypto into its services with a new investment.

According to a Dec. 17 Paxos announcement, the firm’s $142 million series C funding round saw the participation of the payments giant. 

“In the last year, global adoption of crypto and blockchain-based solutions by enterprises has accelerated,” said stablecoin-issuer and cryptocurrency broker Paxos’ co-founder and CEO, Charles Cascarilla. “We are proud to count among our clients’ global leaders in payments, banking, trading and fintech, such as PayPal, Credit Suisse, Societe Generale and Revolut.”

Other than PayPal, the latest Paxos funding round saw the participation of Mithril Capital, PayPal Ventures, RIT Capital Partners plc, Ken Moelis, Alua Capital, Senator Investment Group and more. The leading investor was Declaration Partners, the investment firm backed by the family office of U.S. billionaire and businessman David M. Rubenstein.

Cascarilla said Paxos intends to use the funds to hire at least 100 more employees and build trust by obtaining more regulatory licenses, including a national bank charter and SOC 2 certification. The certification is a very tough, very well-respected audit of a company’s processes for securing and protecting customer data. Paxos already has SOC 1 certifications, which cover financial reporting practices.

Paxos will also focus on increasing the type and number of tokenized assets it handles. 

“Today, our clients use our products to tokenize dollars into stablecoins for trading, they tokenize gold into PAX Gold for investing, and they use tokenized securities to settle trades,” Cascarilla said. “In the coming year, these and more use cases will all grow.”

Paxos announced in late October that it is powering the PayPal crypto features that launched in mid-November, including trading and holding bitcoin, ether, litecoin, and bitcoin cash. The company is dealing with a high trading volume, given recent reports suggesting that PayPal users are now buying bitcoin faster than miners produce it.

While Paxos was the partner of record when PayPal announced its cryptocurrency services, rumors were flying in October that it tried to buy Paxos-competitor BitGo. 

The buying pressure generated by PayPal’s bitcoin support may be one of the major reasons why Bitcoin just broke $23,000 earlier today, reaching a new record-high price.