The landscape of the payment industry is about to be reshaped. This time, the protagonist is not a new DeFi protocol, but the global payment giant PayPal.

According to the latest data, PayPal plans to offer a stablecoin scheme with an annualized yield of 4% to compliant users. Looking at the entire stablecoin ecosystem, the TVL of PYUSD, although still behind Ethena (Ethena at 6.455B, PYUSD at 3.854B), is narrowing the gap. The key point is—an risk-free 4% annualized return is already quite extraordinary. It breaks the traditional financial and crypto asset pricing logic, making U on the PayPal platform a scarce asset.

On the other side, payment costs. PayPal’s transaction fee is only 0.99%, far lower than the 1.5%-3.5% plus exchange fee of traditional credit cards. Coupled with the advantage of instant settlement, the delays and exchange loss issues in cross-border payments are completely eliminated.

Why is PayPal’s entry so crucial? A set of market data makes it clear. In the online payment market, PayPal accounts for about 45% of the share (Statista January 2025), far surpassing Stripe’s 17% and Shopify Payments’ 15%. In terms of global payment technology usage share, Visa leads (19%), followed closely by PayPal (15%), Mastercard at 11%, and Stripe and Apple Pay each at 6%.

For merchants, PayPal is the standard gateway for payments, and this position gives it the ability to push any product directly to millions of users. That’s why this step is so critical.