Supply and Demand: Paxos on What Moves Stablecoins Into Corporate Treasury

Most stablecoin conversations start with a list of use cases. Cross-border payments, access to dollars, micropayments, and treasury. Walter Hessert's view is that a stablecoin's properties don't create adoption on their own. Someone has to understand the buyer. In this episode of the stablecoin series, Brett Turner, Founder and CEO of Trovata, and Paul Bances, who leads Trovata's stablecoin efforts, are joined by Walter Hessert, Head of Strategy at Paxos. Paxos issued its first stablecoin under prudential oversight in 2018 and now operates as an OCC-regulated national trust company. Walter and Paul first met at Money20/20 in 2019. Less than a year later, PayPal launched crypto with Paxos as its infrastructure provider. Walter's case is that the GENIUS Act gave the market a definition of a regulated stablecoin, and the infrastructure work it started has kept moving. Issuers can create supply. Demand has to come from applications built by people who understand the buyer's incentives and risks, and he points to treasury as one of the clearest examples. Highlights Paxos has operated under bank-level oversight for a decade. Walter sees that track record as what large, regulated firms look for in an infrastructure partner. GENIUS gave the market a working definition of a regulated stablecoin. The CLARITY Act failing its cloture vote hasn't changed the plans of the firms Paxos is building with. The reciprocity provision in GENIUS lets a single dollar stablecoin move across jurisdictions without a separate version for each market. Issuers create supply. Demand comes from applications that understand the buyer's incentives and risks.