Paxos Trust Company is a New York-chartered trust company that issues regulated stablecoins (USDP, PYUSD, USDG) and tokenized gold (PAXG), and operates clearing and settlement infrastructure for institutional partners. Founded in 2012 and supervised by NYDFS since 2015, Paxos sits in the issuer layer of the stablecoin stack, with reserves attested monthly and bankruptcy-remote customer balances held under trust law.
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The broader market it operates in has scaled to roughly $315 billion in stablecoin supply as of Q2 2026, with USDT and USDC holding the dominant share and a long tail of regulated issuers, including Paxos, occupying the institutional end of the spectrum. This article frames Paxos in the language institutional buyers actually use: primary versus secondary markets, mint access, clearing, settlement, and charter mechanics.
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Paxos is a regulated trust company and stablecoin issuer headquartered in New York. It mints fiat-backed tokens (USDP, PYUSD, USDG) and gold-backed PAXG, holds reserves in segregated bankruptcy-remote accounts, and runs primary issuance and redemption infrastructure used by partners such as PayPal, Mercado Libre, and Interactive Brokers. It operates under NYDFS, OCC engagement, MAS, and EU regimes.
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Paxos began as itBit, a bitcoin exchange founded by Charles Cascarilla and Rich Teo in 2012. In 2015 it became the first company to receive a limited-purpose trust charter for digital assets from NYDFS, a structure that today underwrites how institutional counterparties treat Paxos-issued tokens for reserve, custody, and segregation purposes. The trust-company designation matters more than any specific product line: it is the legal scaffolding that lets regulated counterparties hold and clear digital dollars without forcing the underlying balances onto a bank or broker-dealer balance sheet.
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In the orchestration and clearing vocabulary of TradFi, Paxos sits at the issuance node. It is where dollars become tokens in the primary market. Secondary trading happens elsewhere, across centralized venues, onchain liquidity, and offchain RFQ. Distinguishing primary issuance from secondary liquidity is foundational to understanding why a neutral aggregation layer above issuers exists at all.
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Paxos issues four principal tokens: USDP (Pax Dollar), PYUSD (PayPal USD, issued under contract), USDG (Global Dollar, issued from Singapore and Europe), and PAXG (Pax Gold). Fiat tokens are 1:1 backed by cash and short-dated U.S. Treasury exposure. PAXG is backed by allocated London Bullion Market Association good-delivery gold bars held in third-party vaults. Each product runs under a distinct regulatory wrapper.
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USDP launched in September 2018 as Paxos Standard (PAX). Reserves are restricted under NYDFS guidance to cash at U.S. depository institutions and short-dated U.S. Treasury bills, with monthly attestations published by Withum. USDP supply has compressed to roughly $32 million as of Q2 2026, reflecting Paxos's shift toward partner-issued tokens (PYUSD, USDG) rather than its own-brand USD float.
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PYUSD launched in August 2023 with PayPal as the brand-facing partner and Paxos as the regulated issuer of record. Supply sits at approximately $2.9 billion as of Q2 2026. The product demonstrates a now-common pattern in primary issuance: large distribution platforms contract a chartered issuer rather than build the reserve-management, redemption, and supervision stack in-house.
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USDG is issued by Paxos Digital Singapore (regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore) and Paxos Issuance Europe (regulated by Finland's FIN-FSA under MiCA). Supply is approximately $2.5 billion as of Q2 2026. The structure lets non-U.S. allocators access dollar tokens through a counterparty that maps to their domestic supervisory framework rather than through an offshore wrapper.
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PAXG is a token backed 1:1 by physical gold bars held in LBMA-accredited Brink's London vaults. Each PAXG represents one troy ounce of a specific, serial-numbered good-delivery bar, and approved holders can redeem to physical metal. PAXG is regulated as a commodity-linked token under the NYDFS trust charter, a distinct regulatory treatment from fiat stablecoins, and traded at roughly $4,315 per token as of Q2 2026 with a market cap near $2.6 billion.
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Paxos operates under a multi-charter stack: a New York limited-purpose trust company under NYDFS, a Major Payment Institution license in Singapore under MAS, and an EU electronic money issuer under Finland's FIN-FSA aligned with MiCA. Each entity issues only into the markets its regulator covers. The combined map lets a single institutional counterparty access dollar and gold tokens across regions through one corporate parent.
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The institutional value of this structure is operational, not ideological. Asset managers, payment processors, and tokenization issuers running global treasury do not want to onboard 12 different counterparties for the same product across regions. The charter map matters because it collapses that integration burden.
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In 2025, NYDFS and Paxos reached a multi-million dollar settlement related to the wound-down BUSD program, per NYDFS. The orderly $16+ billion wind-down of BUSD without a depeg is the operational reference point cited by counterparties evaluating Paxos's runoff capability under regulatory pressure.
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Paxos operates the primary mint and redemption rail. Approved counterparties wire USD to Paxos accounts at regulated banks; Paxos mints tokens 1:1 and delivers them to a designated wallet. Redemption reverses the flow: tokens are burned and dollars are wired out. This is primary-market clearing. Secondary trading on exchanges, AMMs, and OTC desks references the primary peg but does not transact against Paxos directly.
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Mint access is permissioned. Counterparties undergo KYB onboarding, sanctions screening, and ongoing transaction monitoring. The list of approved minters is small relative to the universe of secondary holders, which is why on a typical day USDP and PYUSD trade in volumes that vastly exceed primary mint and redemption activity. The primary tape is where supply changes hands; the secondary tape is where price discovery happens.
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For reserve composition, Paxos publishes monthly third-party attestations by Withum covering cash positions, T-bill holdings, weighted average maturity, and total token supply. The attestations are not a full GAAP audit, but they are the standard reference used by institutional allocators sizing exposure to Paxos-issued tokens against internal counterparty limits.
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In the five-layer stablecoin stack (issuers, rails, orchestrators, custody and fund management, applications) Paxos is an issuer. Issuers mint and redeem the underlying tokens. They do not aggregate liquidity across other issuers, route across chains, or run best-execution analytics. Those functions live at the orchestration layer above the issuer set. The stack is consolidating at every layer except neutral orchestration.
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The market is maturing along recognizably TradFi lines. Issuers like Paxos, Circle, and Bridge occupy the primary market. Custodians like Anchorage and Fireblocks hold the assets. Exchanges, AMMs, and OTC desks intermediate secondary flow. A neutral aggregator pulls across the issuer set so a single counterparty can access mint inventory, onchain liquidity, and offchain RFQ through one integration. Paxos is the canonical proof that the issuance layer has matured into something resembling chartered banking. No one hits a Paxos endpoint to mint Tether, and no one hits a Circle endpoint to mint USDP, which is why the orchestration layer above issuers is structurally distinct from any of them.
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The GENIUS Act, signed into U.S. law in July 2025, establishes a federal framework for payment stablecoins, requiring 1:1 reserves in cash and short-dated Treasuries, monthly reserve reporting, and federal or qualifying state oversight. Paxos's existing NYDFS trust charter, OCC engagement, and reserve composition already map closely to the federal regime, positioning the company as a chartered primary issuer rather than a participant needing to retrofit.
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The substantive shift is competitive rather than operational. With clear federal rules, the regulatory arbitrage that previously favored offshore issuers narrows. Distribution platforms that want stablecoin exposure under a U.S.-recognized framework increasingly contract with chartered issuers. The PYUSD model (a regulated trust company issuing under contract for a brand) is a template, not an exception. Public summaries of the bill are available through the Congressional record, and institutional analysts have begun mapping issuer charters against the federal framework as part of counterparty review.
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Paxos's counterparty list spans distribution platforms, payment companies, and brokerages: PayPal (PYUSD), Mercado Libre and Mercado Pago in Latin America, Interactive Brokers for crypto execution, Nubank, and the Global Dollar Network consortium for USDG. The pattern is consistent: regulated entities that need stablecoin or tokenization functionality outsource the issuance, reserve, and supervisory stack to Paxos rather than build it in-house.
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Institutional buyers tend to evaluate Paxos along three axes: charter quality (NYDFS plus federal engagement plus MAS plus MiCA), reserve composition (cash and short-dated T-bills, attested monthly), and operational continuity (the BUSD wind-down as a stress test). For asset managers and treasury teams running global mandates, the multi-jurisdiction stack collapses what would otherwise be a fragmented onboarding process across regions into a single counterparty relationship.
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For developers, integration with Paxos primary infrastructure is permissioned and contract-based, in contrast to permissionless smart-contract interaction with secondary venues. Application-layer products typically source Paxos-issued tokens from secondary markets rather than minting directly, which is part of why a neutral orchestration layer aggregating across issuers is more useful to most teams than direct mint access to any single issuer.
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Paxos, Circle, Bridge (acquired by Stripe), and a small set of bank-chartered issuers occupy the regulated end of the issuer layer. Tether sits outside this group under a different regulatory profile. Differentiation across regulated issuers turns less on technology and more on charter footprint, distribution contracts, and reserve transparency cadence. Each issues fundamentally similar fiat-backed tokens against fundamentally similar reserve compositions.
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The comparison is not a verdict. It is a description of structural differences relevant to a counterparty review. An institution running a tokenized treasury program with EU and APAC exposure will weight charter coverage differently than a U.S. payment processor optimizing for federal clarity.
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PAXG is a commodity-linked token, not a fiat stablecoin. Each PAXG represents one ounce of a specific LBMA good-delivery gold bar held in allocated storage at Brink's London. Price tracks the spot gold market, not a fiat peg. Regulatory treatment under the NYDFS charter is distinct from fiat tokens. Approved holders can redeem PAXG for physical bars subject to minimum size and delivery logistics.
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Operationally, the mechanics that matter to institutional buyers are allocated versus unallocated storage (PAXG is allocated, meaning specific serial-numbered bars are assigned to the token supply), audit cadence on the vault, and the redemption process to physical metal. LBMA good-delivery standards govern bar size, purity, and chain-of-custody documentation, providing the underlying integrity reference for the token.
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For allocators, PAXG functions as a tokenized wrapper around the same physical exposure that historically required vault custody contracts and bullion dealer relationships. The token form factor adds composability with onchain venues without changing the underlying economic claim.
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Counterparty diligence on Paxos generally covers reserve composition, charter scope, operational continuity, and integration model. The trust-company structure addresses bankruptcy remoteness, but the specific mechanics of segregation, attestation cadence, and supervisory authority differ from issuer to issuer. Below are the questions that typically surface during institutional onboarding.
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Yes. Under the NYDFS limited-purpose trust charter, customer assets are held in trust and segregated from corporate assets. In an insolvency scenario, customer balances are not available to general creditors. This is the structural feature that most distinguishes a chartered trust-company issuer from an unregulated wrapper.
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USD-backed tokens are reserved with cash at U.S. depository institutions and short-dated U.S. Treasury securities, attested monthly by Withum. PAXG is reserved with allocated LBMA good-delivery gold bars in third-party vaults. Composition details are published in each monthly attestation report.
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Direct redemption is available to approved counterparties who have completed KYB onboarding. Retail holders typically redeem through secondary venues. Approved counterparties send tokens to a designated Paxos address; Paxos burns the tokens and wires fiat (or arranges physical delivery for PAXG) to a verified bank account.
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The 2023 to 2024 wind-down of BUSD provides the reference case. Paxos processed orderly redemptions of approximately $16 billion in supply over the wind-down window without the token losing its peg. The 2025 NYDFS settlement closed the historical compliance matter; the operational track record is the data point counterparties cite.
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Eco operates at the orchestration layer above the issuer set. It is a neutral aggregator: institutional counterparties access primary mint relationships, onchain liquidity, and offchain RFQ inventory across multiple issuers (including Paxos) through one integration. Eco does not issue stablecoins, take principal risk, or trade its own book. It coordinates flow across the issuer, custodian, and venue layers.
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The reason a neutral orchestration layer exists is structural. Issuers like Paxos optimize for their own product surface. Custodians optimize for asset safety within their own walls. Venues optimize for their own order books. None of them aggregate across the others, and none of them are positioned to. The institutional value proposition of orchestration is the same as the value proposition of any aggregation layer in finance: one integration, multiple counterparties, with best-execution analytics on the resulting flow. For teams already working with Paxos-issued tokens, this is the layer that sits above the issuance relationship and routes across the wider market.
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For additional depth on the surrounding topics, the following internal references map to adjacent areas of the stablecoin stack and the orchestration layer.

Stablecoin supply and market-cap figures are sourced from DeFiLlama and CoinGecko snapshots dated Q2 2026. Regulatory references cite primary documents from NYDFS, MAS, FIN-FSA, and the U.S. Congressional record. Reserve attestation references point to Paxos's published Withum reports. Where exact figures were not available in the live data snapshot, quarter qualifiers ("as of Q2 2026") are used rather than precise numerics.
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