USDP, also known as the Pax Dollar, is a US dollar-backed stablecoin issued by Paxos Trust Company under a New York State Department of Financial Services trust charter. Each USDP token is redeemable 1:1 for US dollars from reserves held in cash deposits and short-dated US Treasury bills, and Paxos publishes monthly attestations from independent accounting firm WithumSmith+Brown. The token launched in September 2018 as Paxos Standard, rebranded to Pax Dollar in 2021, and trades primarily on Ethereum with limited bridged presence on a small set of other chains. As of April 2026, the supply sits in the low hundreds of millions, well below Paxos's other stablecoin products like PYUSD and the newer Global Dollar (USDG).
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This guide covers how USDP's reserve structure and regulatory framework actually work, where USDP fits inside Paxos's three-stablecoin product family, how it compares to USDC and USDT, and what developers need to know to integrate USDP through Paxos's APIs and onchain contracts.
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USDP is a fiat-collateralized stablecoin. Paxos accepts US dollars from approved counterparties through a regulated trust account, mints an equivalent amount of USDP onchain, and burns the tokens when holders redeem back to dollars. The reserve composition is conservative by design: the Paxos transparency reports for early 2026 show holdings split between cash deposits at FDIC-insured banks and short-duration US Treasury bills with maturities under 90 days, with no exposure to commercial paper, corporate bonds, or repos against riskier collateral.
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WithumSmith+Brown publishes a third-party attestation each month that confirms the dollar value of reserves equals or exceeds the supply of outstanding USDP at a snapshot date. This is an attestation, not a full audit, but it is more frequent than the quarterly cadence used by Tether and matches Circle's monthly schedule for USDC. Paxos lists every attestation report on its transparency page going back to launch in 2018, so reserve history is verifiable rather than asserted. The accounting work is performed under AICPA attestation standards, specifically AT-C section 205, which is the same standard major US accounting firms apply to corporate financial assertions.
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The reserve mechanics under the trust charter are stricter than they look from the outside. NYDFS requires a daily reconciliation of token supply to reserve balances, and Paxos cannot lend, rehypothecate, or pool reserves with other corporate assets. If Paxos became insolvent, USDP holders would have direct claims on the segregated trust assets ahead of general creditors, a property usually described as bankruptcy-remote treatment. The same protection applies to PYUSD and USDG reserves under their respective regulatory frameworks.
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The peg holds through the redemption arbitrage that all fiat-backed stablecoins rely on. When USDP trades below $1 on a venue, market makers with Paxos accounts can buy on the open market, redeem 1:1 with Paxos, and pocket the spread. When USDP trades above $1, the reverse arbitrage applies. Because Paxos is the only authorized issuer and redeemer, the spread compresses quickly under normal conditions. USDP held its peg within roughly 30 basis points during the March 2023 banking stress that briefly de-pegged USDC, mostly because Paxos's reserve structure does not include uninsured deposits at smaller regional banks. During the same period, USDC traded as low as $0.87 on some venues before recovering after Circle disclosed Silicon Valley Bank exposure of $3.3 billion.
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Paxos Trust Company operates under a limited-purpose trust charter granted by the New York State Department of Financial Services in 2015. NYDFS is the most demanding US stablecoin regulator: trust charter holders must segregate customer funds, hold reserves in eligible high-quality assets, file regular reports, and submit to examinations. Paxos was the first company to receive a NYDFS BitLicense in 2015 and the first to receive a trust charter for stablecoin issuance. The charter is the same regulatory framework that authorizes Paxos to issue PYUSD and PAX Gold (PAXG).
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The federal regulatory picture changed materially in 2025. The GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, established the first federal framework for payment stablecoins, requiring 1:1 backing in cash or short-term Treasuries, monthly disclosures, and bankruptcy-remote treatment of customer reserves. Federal Reserve guidance through 2025 and into early 2026 has clarified how state-chartered issuers like Paxos coordinate with federal supervisors. Paxos's existing NYDFS framework already met most GENIUS Act requirements, so USDP's compliance posture did not change significantly. The companion FIT21 market structure bill, which passed the House in 2024 and is now under reconciliation in 2026, would further define which stablecoins fall under SEC versus CFTC jurisdiction.
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The GENIUS Act sets a two-track licensing regime. Issuers above $10 billion in outstanding supply must operate under federal supervision through the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, while smaller issuers can continue under qualifying state regimes including NYDFS. As of Q1 2026, Paxos's combined supply across USDP, PYUSD, and US-distributed USDG sits below the federal threshold but is approaching the line, and Paxos has signaled in industry filings that it intends to maintain its NYDFS charter as the primary supervisor with optional federal coordination rather than full OCC migration. The choice is consequential: NYDFS supervision is more product-flexible than OCC bank charters, which is why issuers like Paxos and Circle have historically preferred state trust charters.
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This regulatory framing matters for institutions. USDP is one of a small number of dollar stablecoins that financial firms can hold on a balance sheet under existing US bank rules, alongside USDC and PYUSD. Tether's USDT, which is issued from El Salvador and the British Virgin Islands, does not qualify under most US bank custody frameworks. The Federal Reserve's 2023 stablecoin supervisory letter specifically distinguishes regulated US issuers from offshore ones for state-chartered bank participation in stablecoin activities, and that distinction carries through to GENIUS Act eligibility.
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USDP is primarily an Ethereum asset. The original ERC-20 contract at 0x8E870D67F660D95d5be530380D0eC0bd388289E1 remains the canonical issuance, accounting for the majority of USDP's circulating supply. Bridged versions exist on a small set of other chains where Paxos or third-party bridges have deployed wrapped representations, but most onchain activity, liquidity, and DEX integration stays on Ethereum mainnet. This is a contrast with USDC, which has native multi-chain issuance through Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol, and USDT, which has substantial native deployments on Tron, Solana, and BNB Chain.
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The narrower distribution reflects Paxos's product strategy: USDP serves institutional payment and treasury flows where Ethereum mainnet is the default settlement layer, while Paxos pushed broader chain coverage into its newer Global Dollar (USDG) token. For developers building cross-chain flows that include USDP, this means routing typically starts and ends on Ethereum or on chains with deep USDP-USDC liquidity that allow swap-and-bridge paths.
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Liquidity venues for USDP include Curve Finance for stablecoin-to-stablecoin swaps, Uniswap v3 for concentrated liquidity pools, plus centralized exchanges (Binance, Kraken, Coinbase) for fiat onramps and offramps. The DeFi Llama stablecoin dashboard for USDP shows total onchain TVL and chain distribution updated daily.
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Paxos issues three distinct USD-pegged stablecoins, each targeting a different distribution channel. Understanding which one fits a given use case requires understanding the product split.
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USDP (Pax Dollar) is Paxos's institutional and DeFi-native dollar. It launched in 2018, sits primarily on Ethereum, and serves trading desks, market makers, and onchain treasuries that want NYDFS-regulated exposure without the consumer distribution channels of PYUSD or USDG. Supply is the smallest of the three.
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PYUSD (PayPal USD) is the stablecoin Paxos issues on PayPal's behalf, launched in August 2023 and now distributed through PayPal, Venmo, Xoom, and a growing list of merchant integrations. Reserves and regulatory framework are identical to USDP — same NYDFS trust charter, same WithumSmith+Brown attestations — but the brand and distribution belong to PayPal. PYUSD launched on Ethereum and expanded to Solana in 2024 to access faster, cheaper retail payment flows. Supply crossed $1 billion for the first time in mid-2024 and continued growing through 2025.
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USDG (Global Dollar) is the newest of the three, launched in November 2024 as the issuer token for the Global Dollar Network, a consortium that shares yield with distribution partners including Robinhood, Kraken, Anchorage Digital, Bullish, Galaxy, and Nuvei. USDG is issued by Paxos's Singapore subsidiary under a Monetary Authority of Singapore framework rather than NYDFS, which lets it serve non-US holders directly. By Q1 2026 USDG supply had grown into the hundreds of millions as more distribution partners onboarded.
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For a US-regulated counterparty that wants direct dollar exposure with no PayPal layer and no Singapore framework, USDP remains the right choice. For consumer payments, PYUSD. For non-US distribution with revenue sharing, USDG.
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The three largest dollar stablecoins by trading activity are USDC (Circle), USDT (Tether), and the Paxos family (USDP plus PYUSD plus USDG). They differ on issuer jurisdiction, reserve transparency, chain coverage, and supply scale.
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The practical takeaway: USDP and USDC are functionally similar from a US institutional perspective. Both are NYDFS-supervised, both publish monthly attestations from major accounting firms, and both hold conservative reserve mixes. The differences are scale and chain coverage. USDC dominates onchain stablecoin TVL with multi-chain native issuance, while USDP keeps a tighter institutional focus on Ethereum.
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USDT sits in a different category entirely. Supply is larger, chain distribution is broader, but the reserve composition and regulatory framework keep most US banks and registered investment advisers from holding it directly. For a developer building a stablecoin flow, the choice between the three usually reduces to which counterparties the application needs to interact with: regulated US institutions push toward USDP or USDC, global retail and offshore trading desks push toward USDT, while consumer payment apps push toward PYUSD.
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The applications that make sense for USDP cluster around three patterns: institutional treasury, regulated DeFi, and onchain settlement between US-licensed counterparties.
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Institutional treasury and trading. Crypto-native trading firms, market makers, and prime brokers hold USDP as the dollar leg of trading positions when they need NYDFS-supervised counterparty exposure. Paxos's settlement service can deliver USDP same-day to a wallet or bank account, which is faster than wire-based USD settlement and avoids the regulatory ambiguity of holding USDT.
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Regulated DeFi. A subset of DeFi protocols have explicit policies around reserve quality and issuer regulation for the stablecoins they accept as collateral. Aave's Risk Stewards and Maple Finance's institutional credit pools both treat NYDFS-supervised stablecoins differently from offshore-issued ones. USDP qualifies as eligible collateral or reserve asset in those frameworks where USDT does not.
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Settlement between US licensed entities. Two NYDFS-regulated companies can settle obligations in USDP without leaving the US regulatory perimeter. This matters for crypto exchanges, custodians, and broker-dealers that need to demonstrate clear chain-of-custody for customer dollar balances. Paxos publishes a standard institutional integration documentation set covering KYC, settlement, and redemption flows.
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For pure consumer payment flows, USDP is rarely the right tool — PYUSD is built for that channel through PayPal's distribution. For DeFi yield strategies that depend on multi-chain liquidity, USDC or USDT typically have deeper pools.
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USDP launched on September 10, 2018 as Paxos Standard (PAX), one of the first NYDFS-supervised stablecoins to come to market. It hit $200 million in circulating supply within the first three months and crossed $1 billion in March 2021 during the broader stablecoin growth cycle. The peak supply of around $945 million in late 2021 has not been revisited; supply contracted through 2022 and 2023 as Paxos shifted institutional flows toward USDP's successor products.
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The August 2021 rebrand from Paxos Standard (PAX) to Pax Dollar (USDP) was a positioning move rather than a technical one. The contract address stayed the same, the regulatory framework stayed the same, but the new name aligned with Paxos's broader stablecoin strategy that was about to expand. PAX Gold (PAXG) had launched in 2019 as a tokenized gold product. PYUSD followed in August 2023 through the PayPal partnership. USDG in November 2024 through the Global Dollar Network consortium. USDP became the institutional Ethereum-native dollar in a four-product family rather than the flagship.
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One pivotal moment in USDP's history was the BUSD wind-down in February 2023. NYDFS ordered Paxos to stop issuing Binance USD, the white-label stablecoin Paxos had operated for Binance since 2019, citing concerns over Binance's compliance practices. The order did not affect USDP, PAXG, or other Paxos products, and the regulatory action actually reinforced the credibility signal of NYDFS supervision: when a regulator instructed the issuer to stop, the issuer stopped within hours. BUSD wound down in an orderly fashion through 2023, with the last redemptions clearing in early 2024.
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USDP integration falls into two layers: onchain (the ERC-20 contract) and offchain (Paxos's API for mint, burn, and reconciliation).
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The onchain layer is straightforward. USDP is a standard ERC-20 token with no rebasing, no fee on transfer, and no upgrade proxy that has materially changed token behavior since launch. Reading balances, approving spenders, and transferring USDP works exactly like USDC or DAI from a contract perspective. Wallets like MetaMask and Rabby display USDP natively (Phantom handles the bridged Solana version). Smart contract integrations should reference the canonical Ethereum address rather than wrapped versions to avoid liquidity fragmentation.
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The offchain layer is where USDP differs from purely permissionless stablecoins. To mint USDP from dollars or redeem USDP to dollars, an integrator needs a Paxos institutional account with KYC, AML, and ongoing compliance monitoring. The Paxos API exposes endpoints for creating funding instructions, executing mint and burn operations, and reconciling settlement. Typical onboarding for a fintech or trading firm runs four to eight weeks and includes a compliance review, banking setup, and API access provisioning.
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Once an account is live, developers usually wire Paxos's settlement endpoint into their backend so that user-facing dollar deposits trigger a USDP mint, and dollar withdrawals trigger a USDP burn. Paxos handles the underlying bank transfer to or from its operating accounts. For applications that don't need direct minting access, the alternative is to source USDP from secondary markets (Kraken, Coinbase, Curve, Uniswap) and operate as a holder rather than a minter. Most consumer apps follow the secondary-market path; only firms with high transaction volume justify the operational cost of direct Paxos integration.
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Because USDP is concentrated on Ethereum, applications that need to deliver USDP to a user on another chain face a multi-step problem. The path is typically: source USDC or USDT on the destination chain, swap into a bridged USDP wrapper if one exists, or bridge from Ethereum directly. Each leg adds latency and slippage.
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If a developer is routing USDP across chains as part of a stablecoin flow — for example, accepting USDP from an institutional counterparty on Ethereum and delivering USDC or USDT to a user on Base, Arbitrum, or Solana — Eco Routes handles the multi-chain orchestration on supported chains. Eco selects between Circle's CCTP V2, LayerZero, and Hyperlane based on cost, speed, and finality requirements for each transfer leg. The application sees a single intent ("deliver $X to address Y on chain Z") and Eco picks the underlying rail.
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For pure same-chain USDP movement on Ethereum mainnet, no orchestrator is needed. The complication only appears when the user-facing experience requires the dollar to land on a different chain than where USDP was sourced. Paxos itself does not run a cross-chain bridge for USDP, which is why orchestration layers handle the routing problem rather than the issuer.
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USDP's strengths are also its limits. The NYDFS regulatory framework provides strong consumer protection and reserve transparency, but it constrains who can mint and redeem directly — only KYC'd institutional accounts. The conservative reserve mix (cash plus short Treasury bills) avoids credit risk but earns less yield than commercial paper or longer-duration paper, which Paxos cannot share with holders under the trust charter rules.
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The narrow chain distribution is a real friction for DeFi-native users who expect native multi-chain stablecoin issuance. Bridged USDP carries the same trust assumptions as any wrapped asset: solvency depends on the bridge custodian, not on Paxos. Users routing USDP through bridges should treat the bridged token as distinct from canonical Ethereum USDP for risk-modeling purposes.
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The biggest residual risk for USDP is concentration: if Paxos's institutional banking partners impose restrictions or if NYDFS imposes new reserve rules, USDP's redemption mechanics could face friction even if reserves remain fully backed. The same risk applies in different forms to USDC and PYUSD. The mitigation, for any single-issuer stablecoin, is diversification across issuers rather than reliance on any one regulator's stability.
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Eco is a stablecoin orchestration platform that lets applications send USDP, USDC, USDT, and other regulated dollars across 15 supported chains through a single intent API. For developers integrating USDP into a multi-chain product, Eco Routes selects between CCTP V2, LayerZero, Hyperlane, and other rails based on the cost, speed, and finality requirements of each transfer. The application emits an intent, and Eco picks the underlying transport. Eco does not compete with Paxos's issuance — it routes the tokens Paxos already issues to wherever they need to land.
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Yes. USDP is the ticker symbol for the Pax Dollar, both refer to the same token issued by Paxos Trust Company. The product launched in September 2018 as Paxos Standard (PAX) and rebranded to Pax Dollar (USDP) in August 2021. The underlying ERC-20 contract address has not changed across the rebrands.
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USDP and PYUSD are both issued by Paxos under the same NYDFS trust charter with identical reserve and attestation structures. The difference is distribution: USDP is Paxos's institutional and DeFi-focused dollar, while PYUSD is the stablecoin Paxos issues on PayPal's behalf for consumer payment flows through PayPal, Venmo, and Xoom.
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Yes. Paxos Trust Company operates under a limited-purpose trust charter from the New York State Department of Financial Services, with reserves held in cash deposits and short-dated US Treasury bills. WithumSmith+Brown publishes a third-party attestation each month confirming the reserves match outstanding USDP supply.
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USDP trades on major centralized exchanges (Kraken, Coinbase, Binance) and on decentralized exchanges including Curve Finance and Uniswap v3 on Ethereum. For institutional minting and redemption directly with Paxos, an applicant needs a KYC'd Paxos account with banking and compliance setup, which typically takes four to eight weeks.
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USDP is primarily an Ethereum asset, with the canonical ERC-20 contract holding the majority of circulating supply. Limited bridged versions exist on a small set of other chains where Paxos or third-party bridges have deployed wrapped representations. For broader native multi-chain coverage, Paxos points users to its newer Global Dollar (USDG) token.
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