Paxos Labs - Private Stablecoin Payroll, USAD on Aleo, and Compliant DeFi Yield

Angelie, thanks for coming on the show. I love your background. Very on brand with us. Is it is this Airbnb, or is this just is this your taste? Oh, this is my house. I'm very I'm a hardcore Paxos Maxi. So, you know, when I got the job, I was like, I might as well dredge the place of green. And, you know, that that's very fitting as a go to market marketing person to make sure you're on brand whenever you're coming on stream or engaging. So congrats. How how long have you been at Paxos Labs?

I think it's pretty fresh. Correct?

Yeah. About eight months as the team sort of spun out.

I was hiring number one, two, something like that as, like, just as a core labs hire. It's been great sort of building up from fatigue. So so how I I was briefly talking about this. How fast was that or how soon was that after the whole hyperliquid USDH rush? Because I know I remember talking to Bo, and that was a bit of a the acquisition had happened. It was kind of in it was kinda under wraps, and then it was like, hey. This is happening. We're gonna come out of stealth.

And we weren't prepared to, but we need to because this is an exciting exciting proposal.

Yeah. I mean, I think I joined the team in June, and the Hyperliquid proposal was around September, if I'm not wrong. And so it's just, like, a couple months. We were building in the background, like Joe mentioned, fully in stealth, doing a rebrand, kind of working through a lot of the legal work in the back end.

And it was just a spur of the moment. It happened, and we're just like, hey. We might as well throw our hat in the ring. Oh, that was that was a crazy week even here at Stable Dash. We were we were kind of sprinting all over the prey place. I think I did, like, a report to just kind of break down everybody's position. But so so how has the last eight months at Paxos Labs been?

I I guess and maybe for for listeners the first time, how should people think about the difference between Paxos Labs and and the relationship here?

Yeah. I mean, so Paxos, most people know of. It's existed, you know, predates Ethereum. It's been around for about thirteen years. Focuses on just, like, bare metal stablecoin and, like, crypto infrastructure, so brokerage, orchestration, as well as, like, stablecoin issuance. So people know us for PYUSD. In the back end, we power every crypto transaction for Mastercard, Stripe, Visa, Venmo, PayPal. So any of the large institutions that you know that offer crypto rails, it's probably powered by Paxos.

So what's happened over the last year or so is there was this just, like, influx of interest in from people like PYUSD. They're just like, how do we offer more utility for our stablecoins? Or how do we make sure that our users can do more with their stablecoins on our platform? And so they started incubating this idea of labs in house and then spun out through this acquisition of Nucleus that kind of does Vault's technology for a lot of d five protocols.

So Paxos Labs is essentially, like, a subsidiary or a, like, affiliated brand. We're an independent entity. We function on our own, but we have a lot of, like, co marketing and, like, co work that we do together, co selling. I really think of it as the way we think of, like, the Paxos family of products, including Fortify, that was a recent acquisition for Paxos, is this, like, integrated suite of neutral infrastructure that enterprises can use to go on their entire on chain journey from onboarding into crypto.

So just having brokerage or orchestration rails or issuing their own stablecoin, whether regulated or backed by stables, to then having variety of, like, wallet and custody options via Fortify, and then, like, how do you offer things like yield and lending and borrow access? And so that's what we do at Paxos Labs.

It's like the last part of this process of once you've come onto crypto rails and once you come into stable coins, how do you offer further on chain primitives to your users fully embedded onto your platform?

I've always found the Paxos suite of products interesting. We got the honor of doing a a Global Dollar Network season, and there and there was definitely this distinct focus of, yes, there's a close relationship with Paxos and Global Dollar Network, but think of these really as two players that are just working together very closely. In regards to Paxos Labs, how how has the launch been? I think you came out there was was it Alio that came out with a stablecoin recently?

Talk a little bit how that that came to fruition and how Paxos Lab is powering that that stablecoin.

Yeah. So the Alio conversation has been going on, like, before my time even and before labs even spun out. It was a conversation between Alio and Paxos. And as labs spun out, it made a lot more sense for Alio to work with Paxos. So Paxos Labs. And so the way USAD functions is USAD is backed one to one by USDG, which is the Global Dollar Network token. And so we, as Paxos Labs, basically issue USD. So we mint every USD that is in use, and then we do a lot of just, the co selling and co work that goes into it.

So recently, USD got listed on Toku, and it's honestly one of the most exciting use cases for a private stablecoin that I'm very excited So, you know, combining stablecoin infrastructure with that your transactions are not private, your, like, transaction history is private, and the number is private. And I think it's very interesting use case for a stablecoin in general. So that's how we've been working with them so far. Yeah. We might have lost you for a second. For those who don't know, who's Toku first?

Maybe let's start there. Yeah. So Toku is one of the largest stablecoin or crypto payroll providers in the play in the space. So they offer everything from USDC, USDT, USDG, and now, I think, not BYUSD. Forgive me. I'm not familiar if they do offer BYUSD, but they do offer USD at this point.

So, you know, historically, stablecoin payroll has been something that a lot of larger institutions are a little bit hesitant to kind of step into, mainly because there's a lot of maybe excessive transparency when it comes to HR. And so this is something that we were talking about in terms of, like, any large institution doing business on crypto rails.

The transparency of the blockchain ledger is actually a detriment to them because there is a lot of trade secrets that go into, you know, the vendors that you're paying, how much you're paying each employee, who your contracts are with. And so, effectively, a lot of them have shied away from using Stablecoins for payment transactions for this reason. So something like the USAID, which is a private Stablecoin, they're now able to sort of, like, step in and start using Stablecoins as payments.

And so Alio is now working with a few NGOs. They're working with Toku, Stablecoin payments, payroll,

and a few others that, you know, otherwise would not have enough considered Stablecoins as a payment option. What you just talked about, like, was something that hit very close to home. My first, like, journey into Web three professionally was with a fiat crypto platform that was that was Rise and so kind of a competitor to Toku. But that was something that clients would come to us quite frankly, and they would say, hey.

I'm kinda dealing with some drama right now because so and so found somebody else found the wallet address and, like, traced the transactions back, and now they know what all 50 people are getting paid, and they want a raise. And they're like, we would we would love to continue to do stablecoin payroll, but part of the reason why we're still using legacy payroll solutions is so we don't have to deal with this problem. So I guess and, obviously, you're with Paxos Labs, not not Alio.

Why privacy at the stablecoin level versus maybe at the, you know, larger infrastructure layer? You know, we're seeing Solana coming out with with changes to their infrastructure to enable privacy. You see Canton Network having privacy by default. Is is it more for easy interoperability where it's like, hey. As long as you integrate our stablecoin, now privacy is coming away. You don't have to make any changes.

How how do you look at that that conversation, and how does that even maybe affect Paxos Labs' approach to to stablecoin issuance? I mean, I I don't know if it affects our

approach to stablecoin issuance. We are incredibly, like, neutral infrastructure providers. And to us, our partners that we work with, they often have the vision in terms of, like, exactly how they want their stablecoin implemented. So Alio, their value proposition, so they have their own kind of wallet that came out. So at the wallet level is also private.

But kind of, like, breaking it down to the Stablecoin level was something that Alia was very keen to do, and I think it's very interesting in terms of, like, how to approach the privacy for Stablecoins. But in terms of, like, Paxos Labs, it's not really, like, our core focus. We do provide a variety of options in terms of, like, how stablecoins are used, and I think this is a use case that is exciting in general.

Yep. I think, like I said, I've talked about a few times that we I kinda just mentally bookmarked. What what are the themes that keep have been getting brought up, you know, even in our two, three weeks of doing the show? On chain effects, privacy, payroll. Like, those are the three ones right now that across all conversations continue to cut into to get brought up, and it's probably something we'll end up doing some sort of report around it in the future on, like, what are the common themes? What does it mean?

Who are the players in the space? So so for your role right now at Paxos Labs, especially in the marketing, we're seeing this emergence right now of of stablecoin issuers. It feels like I see a a new one each week or we see a different approach. I think I was even just talking about m 0 and PYUSD as a stablecoin backing. You mentioned using USDG as a stablecoin backing. How do you differentiate Paxos Labs in this market? And maybe what is a bit of,

I guess, say, your approach to these conversations and kind of the lane as a marketer you wanna carve out for yourself? Yeah. I mean, at Paxos Labs, our issuance product that we call Origin is actually, like, a smaller part of our offering. What we really focus on is actually providing yield on platform for a variety of, like, in a variety of strategies. Right? So we have a a few structured strategies that we provide, treasury strategy, a core strategy, a frontier strategy.

So we do this by managing assets in the back end through our own proprietary systems. And so that's really what our core offering is. Stablecoin issuance is a smaller part that we work with, like, specific partners on, and our real focus is really, like, how do we make sure that enterprises have a safe and secure way to offer compliant yield as well as complying lending and borrower market access to their users.

So when you think about larger enterprises, you think of your Schwab's, you think of your Bank of America. When they think of offering yield, they're not really ready to open up access to AveoMorpho and just say, hey. Here's a free for all. Right? Like, they're not just going to embed that into their platform immediately. They need a lot of guardrails in place. They need to know what kind of compliance and, you know, screenings are going into it.

What kind of, like, capital is flowing into these markets with their their blacklisted actors. And so having all of those structures and guardrails put into place so that these large enterprises can come on chain and offer these on chain primitives in a way that it, like, meets their requirements, that's what we're focused on. So our and we call that Amplify. So and that product suite is what we focus on.

And within Amplify, we do offer sort of, like, a fully branded experience where the receipt token is branded, where the stablecoin, the, you know, input is branded. That's where, like, the branded issuance sort of comes into play. So partners that we work with outside of that, like Alio, are typically, like, one offs and, like, special cases where we really believe in, like, the vision and the direction and that they're building in and that we wanna support.

And so when the as a marketer, I right. I'm I'm interested to to kinda hone into this angle because we we both talk with founders, CEOs. As you're thinking about bringing this product to market, how do you think through educating these users? You know, I think we have Will later on in the show. We'll talk about research. Research, we've definitely seen as a as a key driver to helping pre bring people zero to one.

Obviously, that was a main inspiration for us launching this show and our podcast was to to educate people. How are you finding that people are being educated? How educated are you are they when they approach Paxos Labs, or are you seeing that you're having to really own this whole customer journey?

It's a large part of the customer journey that we have to own. And I think, like, marketing at a b to b enterprise facing company, especially at the time that we're in, is a lot more customer education and sort of, like, sales support. It's very much sales adjacent is how I think about it. And when I talk to folks about marketing, especially for Paxos Labs, I would say it's like an eighty twenty split. Right?

80% of it is how do we make sure that our sales motion is set up to handle objections, to educate further up than just like traditional marketing of creating noise and visibility. And I would say that's, like, 20% of our efforts. Right? And so within this 80%, I think what we're finding is typically, like, our inbound interest is usually from somebody that is fairly crypto knowledgeable. They understand the mechanics. They understand the infrastructure.

But what happens is the further up the chain this goes, the less and less they are integrated and knowledgeable about the space. So there is a lot of education that goes into this process of how does compliance work. Right? And, like, who are the players in this space? Who's custody by? What are the different options for flow funds? Who are the main actors within this place? Where are the funds flowing?

And so, like, all of those questions need to be answered and are constantly things that are being brought up through objection handling and, like, customer discovery calls. And so a lot of marketing is really, like, trying to understand where our customer is and then trying to help them sort of that bridge that gap and get to that yes.

Where do you think most people are in 2026? Because I think we tend to have this bias that people are a lot farther along than we think. And I'd say anecdotally, that's just not true. I think that, you know, that I think there's somebody I know in locally, they he works for Invesco. And, you know, I'll drop I'll see him around and drop onto finance, and he's like, yeah. I'm familiar with it. But still, as far as, like, the what is the broader impact of tokenization?

The gap is, I think, still just way bigger than we think. What what do you think? I think it's pretty large still.

Right? The way I like to think about it is if you look at the bell curve of adoption, we very much finished that early adopter phase, and we're sort of jumping this chasm between early adopters to this, like, mid curve where a majority of users are. What we're finding in, like, this early stage is that folks in the fintech fintech adjacent space, they're probably a little bit more exposed to what's happening in crypto.

Now when you go into, like, more creative industries, I have a lot of friends that are in, like, advertising or, like, film production. And for them, it hasn't clicked as much. To them, it's still kind of speculative. But when you talk to somebody who is coming out of Morgan Stanley or anybody that's in, like, a fintech adjacent field, it's kind of, like, clear that the trend is shifting this way. You're seeing SoFi with SoFi USD.

You're seeing, like, a lot of large institutions are already trying to either have their own stablecoin or offer crypto and platform. A lot of investment firms are offering crypto, like, capital management. And so I think this is just becoming very obvious for people in the fintech side of things. It's gonna take some time before it trickles and permeates into the rest of society in general, but I I think it's just a matter of time. Right?

I joined crypto in 2017, and I thought it was you know, enterprise adoption was coming, and it's almost ten years later. And it's finally here, and I think that's the reality. Like, we're in maybe the best political climate for crypto. No comments on anything else, but probably the best climate for crypto. A lot of institutions have kind of, like, gotten over their fear of being associated with tokenization and cryptocurrencies.

And I think we're just gonna see that trend continue and kind of, like, ramp up as we go through maybe the next two, three, five years.

You mentioned so 2017, that's I mean, that you you might you're tenured now in the crypto space. Did I see that part of that journey was with with Tron? It was. Yeah. From 2019 onwards, I was at Tron. How how was how was that time, especially, you know, even we still look at the space where, you know, that Tron holds as as you with USDT still being this solidified player. I mean, I remember going back to my time at RISE, the amount of requests I got from emerging markets for, do you support Tron?

Do you support Tron? And and being somebody in The US, I like, Tron? Why? So, you know, what was that time like, and how did that begin to shape your, I guess, your perspective on where this market was heading? I mean, I think Tron was an absolutely

insane ride. As director of marketing there, I've seen a couple of different cycles, you know, got to be in the weeds of a lot of really creative campaigns. I think just like back then, we knew that the political climate would shift. And a lot of the work that we did was sort of, like, towards that direction. And even, like, in 2019, you're talking about USDT and Tron. This was, like, right when we had onboarded USDT and Tether and started working with them.

And we had a goal to kind of do better than USDT and Ethereum. And within, like, two, three years, we were overshadowing that by, like, a large number. And that was very much due to, like, boots on the ground adoption in, like, emerging markets. And it was just, like, one of those things that, like, struck true to me there that, like the reason I came onto crypto was because from you know, I'm from India, and, like, capital difference, sending money back, just like FX, it's such a complex process.

And I knew a lot of people that were sending cash back. Right? And so when you start to see how USDT and TRON became so prevalent, a lot of it was people recognizing that they wanted access to US dollars and they wanted a way to spend capital, and it just became, like, the easiest way to do that. And it was such a a moment of realization that, like, this is how adoption was really going to take off. It took me some time to, like, move into a space where I was working in stablecoins directly,

and I'm happy to be in that space right now. But it definitely, like, set the cadence for what was to come. It is crazy how fast it's changed. I think, you know, we're a little bit over a year of doing this. Remember when I left my last role and I told people, hey. I'm gonna just focus on, like, stablecoin content. It still hadn't, like was obviously people knew that they were important, but it had not you know, we weren't seeing news every week, and it was kind of this, like, stablecoins?

Like, that's kind of boring, don't you think? And it's crazy. A year later, like, there's six there's 20 news stories. What what are you looking forward to? And when you I I guess, actually, more what I'm asking is you mentioned boots on the ground activation with Tron. We're in this age right now of AI slop content. You're probably more empowered of a marketer than ever because of AI. We obviously use a ton. We're not a massive team. How has that informed your go to market process?

How are you seeing clients wanting to be engaged and wanting to learn about these concepts? Do you mind repeating that question? Yeah. I guess I'm asking, you know, we we've kinda made this bet, I'd say, this livestream that people are getting overloaded with AI content. There's more research reports than ever. There's more LinkedIn posters than ever. It's faster you you can get out of a tweet faster than ever, especially when it comes to learning about these complex topics. How do they wanna learn?

How does that inform a go to market motion? Is this events? Is this live streams? Is this webinars? Are we almost, like, taking this, like like, a step back five years to how people want to learn and and kind of want to do those things that aren't scalable. So I guess I'm asking, what's your approach and what's your outlook as a marketer? Maybe less of a staple coin approach, but more of a market marketing philosophy and where AI fits into this picture.

Yeah. I mean, I think AI has made life a lot easier, but also a lot harder in some ways. Like you mentioned, there's just so much content out there, even from, like, podcasts to we're just, like, in a content overload at this point. Right? And what I'm seeing is people are trying starting to shift more and more to real authentic connection.

In San Francisco, for example, like, hackathons are just like a very, very common way for you to just, like, try and get people to get to know you and get to know what you're building. And this has always been true about marketing and advertising. People don't buy the product. People buy the people behind the product. And even this is, like, true for large sales, like, motions. Right?

Like, during COVID, a lot of us moved to this remote work, remote, like, meeting process, whereas sales has often been, like, this in person effort to travel and meet these people. And so for me in marketing, we are trying to make more of an effort to be at the places that our partners are gonna be at, at the places that our customers are gonna be at.

How do we create moments where they don't feel like they're being recorded and they're being listened to, but rather they have safe spaces and chat and pass conversations where a lot of this is nonattributable, but we can learn a lot. How do we have red team sessions with them where we get to learn from their lessons? These are the things that we're building out as, like, a marketing function. That being said, I don't think that, like, AI just goes away. Right?

Like, we have a one person design team and a one person marketing team right now. We're a very, very, very lean team, which means that AI tools have become really what we turn to to make sure that we're able to keep up the pace and the cadence. I I think, like, AI image models and video models are truly, truly spectacular, and our designers have been able to churn out so much work that otherwise I would have had a staff Yeah. Before to do. Right?

And you need specialized skill set to do three d modeling, and all of that kind of work has become simplified. I'm very anti AI content writing, though. I think it's just very, very obvious when somebody has used AI. Right before Patsos, I was building an AI project myself. And, like, just like this AI tweet slop that you kind of see, and the it's the attribution is wrong or the tags are wrong or the m dash and it's x not y. Yeah.

There's there's so many just, like, obvious telltale signs at this point that as a marketer, it's almost about taste more than it is about your ability to execute.

Taste. It's interesting that you brought that up. That's I think that's been a big, big focus of us of ours as well. You mentioned something with the hackathons that I've heard I heard from somebody else recently as well of this notion of getting into a space, going into a it's not even that it's, like, an exclusive event, but just the fact that it's a safe space that's not being recorded that you could only experience if you're there in person.

I guess, has there been any interesting stories or maybe products that you've seen kind of started to get ideated out of these or, I guess, even just on the horizon for Paxos Labs? Like, where do you see see you guys going throughout the rest of this year? I can't really speak to Paxos Labs specifically.

We've had a lot of internal hackathons that I would say that have been super helpful in terms of, like, how we've been shaping our product, but nothing public. We're not really developer facing at the moment, and so we don't really have a big developer community presence. Things that I found that have been interesting when Coinbase was building out X4O2, they did a ton of hackathons in San Francisco. And I think, like, saw a ton of very interesting projects getting built and kind of coming out of that space.

You saw CrossMint sort of, like, doing a lot of things during that space as well in San Francisco. Right now, it's about Clawbot and is building and kind of, like, improving and adding new functionality to it. And I think that's, like, an like, another interesting sort of arena. So it seems to be more in, the AI space that I'm seeing a lot of this happening. Right. I've not seen a lot of hackathons in San Francisco for crypto right now, otherwise. Are you gonna be at a very stable conference this week?

It's a very, very hard conference to get a ticket to, But I'll be around. There's a bunch of side events happening. So we have San Francisco office now, and so I'll be around. Well, if you're a runner, we're doing a it's actually a stable dash the morning next Thursday,

the the the morning before the conference that's that's open to anybody. So, if you're a runner, I hope to see you there. But otherwise, throughout this year, please keep us in mind. If if anything else is going on with Paxos Labs, a new stable coin comes out, we'd love to have you back on the show to to dive into it. Think of us as, like, your your PR assistant, to to come on and, you know, news, pair it with some some video content, and, we'll go from there. But, Anjali, it was great to meet you.

Thank you for coming on the stream today.